I'll start things out by saying that I don't know much about Mixed Martial Arts or the UFC, in general I don't really watch combat sports. That being said, I love boxing movies, and I've enjoyed the MMA ones I've seen, and I'm a big fan of the Safdie Brothers. This marks the first solo effort as a director for Benny Safdie (Josh also has Marty Supreme coming later this year), and he won the best director award at the Venice Film Festival for it. I wasn't expecting this to be incredible by any means, but that praise from Venice plus the idea of Dwayne Johnson in a serious role did have me exciting going in, and I'm sad to say that my excitement was quickly extinguished.
The film follows Johnson as real life MMA fighter Mark Kerr during the years of 1997-2000. Kerr is regarded as one of the pioneers of the sport, and this chronicles his early success and quick descent due to a complicated relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) and his growing addiction to painkillers. Kerr seems like a pretty cool guy, but sadly I didn't find his story to be overly interesting.
This is going to sound nitpicky, but at the beginning of the film there is a title card saying that we'll be following Kerr through the years of 1997-2000. When you really break it down though, almost all of the movie takes place solely in 1999. We open in '97 and then completely skip over '98 and ultimately spend over an hour and a half of the two hour runtime in '99. For some reason the decision to specifically state that we're spending this period of time with him only to really only focus on one year irked me, and the decision to focus so solely on the events of 1999 was one that I think limited how invested I felt. At the end of the day I didn't find that enough time was spent showing how Kerr got to be where he was, and there was nothing pointing to the beginning of his relationship with Dawn, so while both are characters you can empathize with there wasn't enough to fully connect me with them. As I said before, the story also just isn't that interesting. We have so many sports movies out there that deal with similar ideas, and Safdie sadly doesn't do anything to elevate this above them. I'm usually a sucker for a generic sports film but I just found myself uninterested the longer it went on.
While I didn't enjoy the film nearly as much as I wanted to, there are certainly positives to gleam from it. Safdie doesn't manage to elevate the source material, but his craft is very solid. He brings a similar handheld style to what he and Josh used in Good Time and Uncut Gems and it fits the docu-drama kind of style here really well. I also really liked the way he captured a lot of the visuals especially in once scene where Mark and Dawn go to a fair. The costumes are strong, and while you can still clearly tell it's 'The Rock' on screen, the hair and makeup used on him is pretty solid. The performances are also a definite highlight. It isn't saying much, but this is pretty clear career best work from Johnson, and Blunt gives a strong supporting performance of a very complex character. We also get a solid performance from real life UFC fighter Ryan Bader as Kerr's close friend Mark Coleman, ultimately being the person I cared the most for.
I really wish I liked this, it has a ton going for it and it should have been right up my alley. Sadly Benny Safdie fails to elevate a story that just doesn't seem to have enough oomph to justify a two hour long biopic. 2.5/5
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