Dir/Wri: Benny Safdie | Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader | US Sports Biopic 123′ | 2025
Reviewed by Ian Long
Early on in Benny Safdie‘s The Smashing Machine, a reporter asks Mixed Martial Arts fighter Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) how he’d deal with losing a match. For the first time in the story, Kerr – usually as fluent and authoritative as an advertising executive outlining a new marketing strategy to a boardroom – falters. Failure just isn’t something he’s contemplated.
The film (based on an HBO documentary with the same title) goes on to plot Kerr’s trajectory as this unblemished self-image unravels: professionally, personally, and spiritually. Perhaps ironically for a story with its subject matter it pulls its punches a bit, but it’s not fully sentimentalised and remains thoroughly watchable, boasting at least one astonishing, benchmark performance.
Having begun his career as a freestyle wrestler (a serious endeavour, not to be confused with ‘pro wrestling’, the scripted, theatrical variant covered in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler), Kerr finds his vocation in MMA.
Beginning in Brazil and Japan, this new sport allowed fighters from all backgrounds to compete in a form of combat which mixed and matched methods from boxing, jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, karate, wrestling and just about everything else.
This may sound like a terrifying free-for-all, but, as the story shows, rules steadily appeared to curb its worst excesses. Standard boxing now produces more deaths and serious injuries than MMA. Nevertheless, many of the bouts we see in the film seem to devolve into one man lying prone and defenceless on the canvas while another sits on him, pounding his head with his fists.
The film’s trump card is Dwayne Johnson’s total immersion in the role of Kerr, a sleek, burnished, massive figure resembling nothing so much as a colossal bronze statue on temporary leave from its plinth. His heavy, glowering features (a pumped-up Jack Palance crossed with a dash of Anthony Robbins) are apparently the result of prosthetics, but look both natural and unrecognisable.
Similarly submerged in her part, Emily Blunt plays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn. Her bond with Mark clearly has deeper roots than his capacity to provide a lavish lifestyle, but there’s something amiss here. Dawn repeatedly creates emotional chaos just before Kerr faces an important bout, needlessly shattering the calm that she knows is crucial to his preparation. And beneath his poised veneer, Kerr is also troubled, afflicted by a spiralling opioid addiction. As the story proceeds, a Japanese kintsugi bowl, the kind that derives extra meaning from being repeatedly broken and mended, becomes the all-too-eloquent symbol of their relationship.
The film infers that Kerr doesn’t really like hurting people: he only does it to access the intense, ‘orgasmic’ high of being a winner, and to bask in the appreciation of the crowd. But these benefits are predicated on a brutality which he enacts with seeming relish. So what’s the real attraction, the bashing or the basking? The film doesn’t answer this, or ask just why Kerr opts for a version of ‘love’ that must be bought with such extreme violence.
Fans of MMA and Mark Kerr needn’t fear some swingeing exposé: this is no Raging Bull. Kerr’s eventual drug-induced collapse happens offstage, and other creative decisions are slightly fudged. The film drags at times, the last act promises a climax which doesn’t quite arrive, and let’s not talk about ‘My Way’ playing over a long montage of Kerr’s training regime as he rebuilds from his crisis. But nothing can detract from Johnson’s one-of-a kind performance – The Smashing Machine is worth seeing just for that. @_i_a_n_l_o_n_g_
IN UK CINEMAS FROM 3 OCTOBER 2025 | THE SMASHING MACHINE WON THE SILVER LION | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2025