Review: The Smashing Machine sees Dwayne Johnson disappear in her best performance still

When it comes to Dwayne JohnsonI usually know exactly what I’m getting. In most of his films, he is essentially playing a version of himself, he is always the same character. It works for him, but I wanted to see him do something different.

I wanted to see Johnson really stretch, get out of his comfort area and show us something deeper. With The Smashing machineWe were finally able to see Johnson, Truley Act, and I was paved by what he delivered.

This film is not a successful sight or an adventure of the QUIPY action. It is a study of heavy and without compromised characters built entirely around Johnson’s representation of the legend UFC Mark Kerr, and disappears in the role.

For the first time for years, I was not watching “The Rock” on the screen; I was looking at a broken man for addiction, persecuted by pressure and clinging to the fragile hope of redemption. It is easily the most vulnerable and stratified performance that Johnson has ever given and I thought it was worthy of the prize.

The story follows Kerr through the peak of his combat career, where a more obscure truth looms behind each victory: a paralyzing dependence on the prescription painkillers.

The physical balance of sport bleeds in his personal life, in particular his volatile relationship with his longtime girlfriend Dawn Staples, played with a raw conviction of Emily Blunt. The dynamic between Johnson and Blunt is electric in every worst ways while looking at two people who love each other but cannot stop getting apart.

Their topics are relentless, painful and sometimes almost unbearable to look at. Still, this is exactly what makes the film work.

Benny Safdie He directs with inflexible honesty. Non glamor of Kerr or softens the blows of his losses, inside the ring or outside. Instead, Safdie gives us a gritty and structured portrait of a man in war with himself.

There is a weight in every scene and a tension that attracts you during the film. And while the film is undeniably difficult to sit sometimes as it is dark, depressing, suffocating, it is also obsessive real.

There are flashes of light inside the darkness. The film explores Kerr’s bond with the fighter colleague Mark Coleman and those moments of camaraderie give us a look at what the story could have supported us even more.

But where The Smashing machine In the end Shines is in his rapid representation of Kerr’s journey and in the resilience he finds in the wreck of his life. Johnson composes the branch of the brand and draws on something much more fragile with enough fear, despair and need for a connection.

When the film reaches its overwhelming climax, both Johnson and Blunt unleash some of the best works of their career. He is disordered and devastating but never exaggerated.

And however desilated as all this you feel, there is still a spark of hope, which prevents the film from collapsing under its own weight. That little spark is worth it.

The Smashing machine It is not a wellness movie. It is punishing, emotionally draining and heavy in ways that could turn off anyone who expected a more traditional sports drama.

But if you want to see Johnson really recite, really play, this is the movie to watch. Vulnerable, compelling and uncontaminated, it is the most surprising performance of his career, and I hope he is the first of many roles in which he goes in this way.

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