It’s clear that Johnson needs to offer himself over to an thrilling director, and Safdie is a great selection. Along with compelling performing turns in Oppenheimer and Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?, Safdie has co-directed two attention-grabbing motion pictures along with his brother Josh, Good Time and Uncut Gems. The Smashing Machine is Benny Safdie’s solo debut (Josh’s first outing on his personal is Marty Supreme, a really totally different kind of sport biopic, coming later this yr), which implies the time is correct for Johnson to make his transfer towards respectability.
But, past the seen beating that Kerr takes and hand-held verité type employed by Safdie, The Smashing Machine doesn’t actually problem Johnson in any respect. Listed here are the 2 defining options of Mark Kerr: 1) he’s large, some extent underscored each time he’s sitting in an airplane from Japan or shoved subsequent to Daybreak in a sports activities automotive; 2) he’s pleasant, a lot in order that he even checks in on the well being of fellows whose faces he simply caved in.
Johnson has been enjoying huge good guys for so long as he’s been on our screens. Even when the Rock or Luke Hobbs are heels and antagonists on a story stage, Johnson deploys his pure charisma to ensure we’re on his facet. He at all times needs us viewers to love him, regardless of if he’s the duplicitous demigod Maui in Moana or if he’s altering the hierarchy of energy within the DC Universe in Black Adam. Mark Kerr is not any totally different.
Even when Johnson needed to go deeper into character work, Kerr doesn’t give him any alternatives to take action. Take the aforementioned interview scene. Kerr doesn’t know learn how to reply the journalist’s query about what occurs if he loses, partly, as a result of he hasn’t misplaced a match at that time. However he additionally doesn’t know learn how to reply the query as a result of he refuses to even take into consideration what dropping can be like. “I don’t even let these issues into my thoughts,” a smiling Kerr tells the reporter.
Given the excessive stakes of his occupation, Kerr’s reluctance to contemplate loss is smart. Nevertheless it doesn’t make for a compelling character. Kerr explicitly has no interiority for Johnson to discover, regardless of how usually The Smashing Machine provides him house to sit down and take into account his world. Kerr will generally present a bit of little bit of grit in his relationship with Daybreak, however each time she explodes with emotion, he falls again to niceness. These unstable moments normally finish with Kerr retreating to silence, Safdie holding the digicam on the large man as he sits, doing his finest to not take into consideration what occurred.
Consequently, Kerr provides Johnson nothing to do as an actor. There’s no wealthy humanity to convey to the fore, no complication for him to discover. He’s huge and he’s good. He’s able to hurting folks contained in the ring, however he actively avoids reflection. He’s all large floor.
