“The Smashing Machine” (2025) opens with a montage of Mark Kerr – played by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson with heavy prosthetics and a huge, hulking frame – in the ring defeating various opponents as The Rock’s Kerr describes in voice-over his love of fighting and, especially, winning. Director Benny Safdie has described “The Smashing Machine” as an anti-biopic for the way that it focuses on unflattering aspects of Kerr’s MMA career, but what’s most radical here is its lack of a clear arc.
Benny Safdie makes his solo directing debut, having built a well of indie film cred directing intense, heavily stylized flicks about erratic chances and outsiders with brother Josh. For all the press about the performances – The Rock’s Oscar-baiting dramatic turn and Emily Blunt’s nightmare girlfriend – the standout is Safdie and the gritty realism he brings to a story that is familiar but gripping until it fizzles out.
Using yet seeking to upend the sports movie template, “The Smashing Machine” focuses on Kerr’s mixed martial arts fighting career from 1997 to 2000. Kerr’s story serves as a background for a portrait of the UFC in its early days. Before it was a billion-dollar industry, networks were reluctant to broadcast their bloody matches as politicians sought to ban them outright. Kerr is in the midst of an addiction to painkillers and in a volatile relationship with girlfriend Dawn, played by Blunt. His struggles in the ring are matched by his domestic ones, as Dawn bristles under the weight of Kerr’s addiction while Kerr seeks to maintain his focus against his consuming addiction and Dawn’s resentments.
It’s an untidy biopic, one in which the choices don’t all totally work, but for the majority of its runtime, “The Smashing Machine” is a fascinating ride. Safdie shoots it with the late 90s glare. It often feels like watching a turn-of-the-millennium pay-per-view fight, and the grit, sweat, and grime of the ring almost spit onto the camera at times. This is a story told through gashes, kicks, and the disturbing repeated imagery of thin, dewy needles piercing sweat-glistened, marbled, muscled skin. For much of the film, we feel that we’re hurtling toward disaster as Dawn and Kerr spar mentally and Kerr’s sense of control veers wildly into the danger zone.
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Ultimately, though, this is a smaller tale—a riff on the sports biopic—the truly inspiring story quietly unfolds in the background. It’s stylishly shot and scored, and its retro underpinnings give the proceedings an almost quaint perspective. Safdie and team hold up the sports elements of this story. The scenes in the ring are blistering and kinetic. The sound design makes the bone crunching and the smashing cut through the roar of the crowd. These moments are among the most evocative and sensory, intense scrapes with real stakes, financial and physical, that teem with anxiety and intensity.
That same intensity transfers to the central relationship between Kerr and Dawn. Both actors find their way to the characters. Johnson, seemingly eager to show off his dramatic chops, finds a way to twist his charisma to match Kerr’s voice and tone, giving a performance that’s careful and considered if at times very deliberate. Blunt eats up what feels like a one-note performance in a role that sometimes plays like a gift to the manosphere. Kerr comes off as a gentle giant, an earnest ambassador for his burgeoning sport whose kind demeanor periodically erupts into moments of brute strength when it slams up against Blunt’s volatile, mood-oscillating Dawn.
All of it is interesting, intense, and engrossing, ending in a hybrid fiction-to-fact coda that sweeps the movie from under in ways that will likely prove divisive. The Smashing Machine’s anti-biopic approach plays more like a modern, realist update of “Rocky” and less like a revisionist take on the “Rocky” sequels. Three years of Kerr’s career unfurl onscreen and then end just as quickly without any pat arc, making the film into less than the sum of its parts.
At times, “The Smashing Machine” plays like the story of a competitive fighter learning to let go of the addiction to winning. In other moments, it’s an intense two-hander between Kerr’s brute strength and Dawn’s psychological poking. Yet still it’s often content to be a period portrait of a nascent industry and sports league on the cusp of mainstream acceptance. It’s rarely one thing, making for an engrossing but scattered capturing of a moment.
A text coda reminds us of Kerr’s role in establishing the UFC as the financial juggernaut it is today while also lamenting Kerr’s timing as a for-pay fighter in the pre-superstar era. This is perhaps the best indication of what “The Smashing Machine” actually is: a stylishly shot, artfully made advert for the UFC – and homage to Kerr’s service to it – done up with the A24 treatment. It’s a prestige showcase for Safdie, Johnson, and Blunt as well as cross-promotion for the UFC and A24. It’s good synergy wrapped in a brutally honest snapshot that humanizes but is decidedly lacking in cohesion.
Accepting his best director award at Venice, Safdie described “The Smashing Machine” as a work of radical empathy. He’s not wrong. The film drips with affection and nostalgia for its era, its titular fighter, and the craft of training and fighting. It’s an in-depth, evocative depiction of a person who might’ve been a side character in a more conventional sports pic, but it ends on a rushed, underwhelming note. It might be subversive or innovative in the same way that “Joker: Folie a Deux” was, i.e., by subverting audience expectations by withholding and denying, which means that it often has less to say than it has to show. As one character says, “It is what it is until it isn’t.”
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