flex

MILWAUKEE — Technically, Roki Sasaki was available to pitch in relief for the Dodgers on Tuesday night.

Realistically, he wasn’t.

“I wouldn’t say unavailable,” manager Dave Roberts said before the game. “But it is unlikely that we will use him.”

Without the most electric arm in their unreliable bullpen, how could the Dodgers record the final outs required to win Game 2 of the National League Championship Series?

Here’s how: By making their bullpen a non-factor.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto tossed a complete game, becoming the first Japanese pitcher to do so in a postseason game. The offense spared Roberts another late-inning scare by tacking on insurance runs in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings.

The result was a 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers at American Family Field that extended the Dodgers’ lead in the NLCS to two games to none.

Two more wins and the Dodgers will advance to the World Series for the third time in six seasons. Two more wins and they will be positioned to become baseball’s first repeat champions in 25 years.

Ninety-three teams have taken a two-games-to-none lead in a best-of-seven postseason series. Seventy-nine of them have advanced.

In other words, this series is over.

If the Philadelphia Phillies couldn’t overturn a 2-0 deficit against the Dodgers, these overmatched tryhards in Milwaukee certainly won’t.

With the next three games at Dodger Stadium and Tyler Glasnow, Shohei Ohtani and Blake Snell scheduled to start those games, the most pressing question about this NLCS is whether it will return to baseball’s smallest market for Game 6.

Don’t count on it.

The Brewers’ bullpen was supposed to be superior to the Dodgers’, but that advantage has been negated by the Dodgers’ superior starting pitching.

Reaching this stage of October has forced the Brewers to exhaust their relievers, so much so that by the time closer Abner Uribe entered Game 2 in a sixth-inning emergency, he might as well have been Tanner Scott.

“We’re more depleted than the Dodgers are,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said.

The workload made the Brewers’ bullpen as rickety as the Dodgers’, and that was with Sasaki just spectating.

What decided the game was that Murphy had to rely on his bullpen and Roberts didn’t.

Brewers starter Freddy Peralta pitched 5 ⅔ innings. A day after Snell faced the minimum number of batters over eight innings, Yamamoto registered every one of the 27 outs required to win a game.

Roberts said he didn’t hesitate to send back Yamamoto to the mound for the ninth inning. The night before, he called on Sasaki to close, and the decision to remove Snell nearly cost the Dodgers the game.

“Obviously,” Roberts said as diplomatically as he could, “there’s been things with the bullpen.”

Things now include Sasaki, whose ability to shoulder an October workload has come into question after he failed to complete the ninth inning in Game 1. In the game in question, Sasaki gave up a run and had to be replaced by Blake Treinen.

Sasaki’s form in Game 1 sounded alarm bells, and rightfully so. The converted starter still looked exhausted from his three-inning relief appearance against the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 4 of the NL Division Series. His fastball velocity has gradually declined over the postseason, and he’s not the type of pitcher who can be as effective throwing 96 mph as he is when he’s throwing 100 mph.

Sasaki has never pitched as a reliever in the United States or Japan. He spent 4 ½ months on the injured list this year with a shoulder impingement. Just as the Dodgers didn’t know what they could expect from him when they first deployed him out of the bullpen, they don’t know what they can expect from him now moving forward.

“It’s one of those things that we’re still in sort of uncharted territory with him,” Roberts said.

At various stages of the season, the Dodgers have asked themselves the same questions about their downtrodden bullpen: How could they survive when their firemen on their roster were also arsonists? How could they win a World Series with such an untrustworthy group of late-inning options?

In this NLCS, the Dodgers have shown how. They will use them as infrequently as possible.

THE SMASHING MACHINE

(15) 123 min

★★★☆☆

3

WHEN big stars take parts that require them to alter their face with prosthetics it’s often a sign they want to be taken more seriously.

Think Steve Carell in Foxcatcher and Bradley Cooper in Maestro.

In The Smashing Machine — director Benny Safdie’s biopic of UFC heavyweight champion Mark Kerr — it’s Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s turn to sit in the make-up artist’s chair.

Signalling a departure from the typical action hero roles he is best known for, Johnson’s nose, lips, eyebrows and hairline are transformed to play the fighter.

He’s not totally unrecognisable, though.

A professional wrestler himself, The Rock already had the fighter’s hulking physique.

Acting muscles

And he’s in familiar territory being on screen with his trademark biceps on display.

But here he proves he absolutely can flex his acting muscles too.

American amateur wrestling champion Kerr became one of the pioneers of MMA at the turn of the millennium, well before the sport became the worldwide phenomenon it is today.

We meet him as an unbeaten man, skilled at then-permitted, wincingly violent moves like eye gouges, who lives to win, and who can’t comprehend the thought of losing.

But as painkiller addiction takes hold and Kerr succumbs to his first ever defeat, he returns home a human wrecking ball, tearing his house apart in sheer frustration.

Johnson depicts this rage-fuelled tantrum with real proficiency so we can understand it as a loss of control underpinned by a deep vulnerability.

Emily Blunt, excellent as his girlfriend Dawn, can only look on as the “big man who she loves” demolishes their kitchen with his bare hands.

The real Kerr eventually acknowledged and overcame his narcotic reliance, returning from rehab to the ring.

As a sporting tale, this is in familiar triumph-over-tragedy territory, with no surprises.

While the performances are gripping, the script lacks nuance.

Is this brutal watch a knockout? No, not completely.

But will the prosthetics pay off for Johnson come awards season?

They just might.

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

(15) 112mins

★★★★★

3

KATHRYN BIGELOW has done it again, this time turning the camera on the nightmare we all pretend that we can ignore – a nuclear strike.

The director’s tense, claustrophobic, brilliantly staged film grips you from the very first frame.

The story is simple and terrifying – an 18-minute window between a rogue missile launch in the Pacific and its projected strike on Chicago, seen from multiple perspectives.

Every decision, every glance at a screen, every phone call carries huge weight. Uncertainty is the enemy here, and Bigelow wrings every ounce of drama from it.

The cast is flawless. Idris Elba is compelling as a President caught between disbelief and duty, while Rebecca Ferguson delivers a career best as security specialist Captain Olivia Walker.

Elsewhere, Jared Harris, Gabriel Basso, Jonah Hauer-King and Anthony Ramos bring depth as they try to hold a crumbling chain of command together.

It isn’t just a thriller, it’s a heart-stopping meditation on human fragility. If you want cinema that makes you feel the weight of the world in real time, this is the one.

LINDA MARRIC

HIM

(18) 96mins

★☆☆☆☆

3

HORROR film Him feels like it has been stitched together from a dozen better movies, without ever finding a soul of its own.

In short, this is a mess.

The story follows Cameron (Tyriq Withers), a hotshot quarterback whose bright future is thrown off course after a brutal injury.

When retired legend Isaiah (Marlon Wayans) invites him to a secluded training camp, it feels like a chance to rebuild, stronger and faster than before.

But the deeper Cameron steps into Isaiah’s world, the more unsettling it becomes.

Produced by Get Out, Us and Nope director Jordan Peele, Him’s fatal flaw is its emptiness. For long stretches, nothing happens.

Characters drift around muttering ominous nonsense, occasionally raising their eyebrows at the weirdos around them, before going right back to ignoring the obvious.

Withers and Wayans put in respectable perform-ances but the dialogue is clunky, the pacing is dead on arrival and the supposedly shocking reveal is anything but. Even the stylistic additions feel less like art and more like padding for a story that never gets to the point.

Bleak, boring and painfully pretentious, Him isn’t just a bad horror film, it’s the kind of bad movie that thinks it’s being very clever.

LINDA MARRIC