Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine” isn’t what you think it is, especially if you think it’s a movie about a British guy who thinks his typewriter is the tops.
“The Smashing Machine” would seem to bear all the hallmarks of something grittier, darker and more disturbing than it is.
It’s the solo directorial debut of the younger Safdie, whose films with his brother, Josh, have rarely not sprinted headlong into unsettling tumult. Add that sensibility to a true-life tale of a mixed martial arts fighter in the late ’90s, and it’s only natural to spend much of “The Smashing Machine” bracing for tragedy, for some ear-splitting descent into macho calamity.
Yet “The Smashing Machine,” starring Dwayne Johnson as MMA pioneer Mark Kerr, is something simpler and less curious.
A lack of probing was never anything you could accuse a Safdie brothers’ movie of; these are the filmmakers who plunged a
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