Film reviews: The Smashing Machine | Him | Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Dwayne Johnson deals well with the physical demands of playing pro fighter Mark Kerr, but there’s little for him to wrestle with dramatically, writes Alistair Harkness
The Smashing Machine (15) ★★★
Him (18) ★
Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight (15) ★★
Action star Dwayne Johnson gets ready for his acting close-up in The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie’s stripped-down sporting biopic of Mark Kerr, a former wrestler turned Mixed Martial Artist who became an early UFC star in the late 1990s, just before the brutal combat sport started attracting big money and global attention.
At 52, Johnson is almost 25 years too old for the role as written, but is in such great shape he can convincingly handle its physical demands. It helps too that Kerr’s frequently pummelled face and cauliflower ears also make the heavy duty prosthetic transformation Johnson has undergone seem less ghoulish than it might have otherwise.
What’s more surprising, though, is how little there is for Johnson to wrestle with dramatically. The film treads lightly around Kerr’s opioid addiction, which he beats early on after a trip to rehab, and posits instead that his addiction to winning was a far bigger psychological barrier to overcome.
But even here Safdie and Johnson give Kerr’s resulting narcissism a pass, particularly the impact it has on his long-term girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt). A scene in which he berates her for not tending to his cactus, for instance, neatly symbolises the way he secretly views her as a drain on his career, but film doesn’t really contradict this view, relying instead on Blunt’s excellent, lived-in performance to mitigate it without giving her the requisite screen time to prevent Dawn’s out-of-nowhere mental health issues from coming across as attention-seeking hysterics.
On the plus side, Safdie’s determination to avoid sports drama clichés is admirable. But making Mark Kerr a household name doesn’t seem like a good enough justification for a biopic.
There’s more buffed up sports action in Him, a gibberish horror movie about an up-and-coming American football player (Tyriq Withers) forced to prove he has what it takes by submitting to a bizarre training ritual with a veteran quarterback (Marlon Wayans) who may have satanic connections. Directed by debut filmmaker Justin Tipping, the heavily stylised film comes off like an exhausting mashup of Any Given Sunday and The Devil’s Advocate.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight tells the story of Rhodesia’s violent transition to Zimbabwe in the wake of Robert Mugabe’s 1980 election victory through the lens of a feral seven-year-old white girl (Lexi Venter) whose parents don’t want to give up their land.
Though it uses dramatic irony to unpick some of the complexities of colonialism, a surfeit of wispy, Beasts of the Southern Wild-style narration proves grating and its ambitious attempt to present a child’s eye view of the resulting horrors proves too much for this film to pull off consistently.
The Smashing Machine, Him and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight are in cinemas from 3 October
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