Review: The Smashing Machine

The problem with The Smashing Machine isn’t that it’s bad, exactly. It’s that it never decides what kind of bad it wants to be. Benny Safdie’s first solo feature, adapted from John Hyams’ excellent 2002 HBO documentary about MMA fighter Mark Kerr, sets out to subvert the clichés of the sports biopic. It’s not aiming to be Creed, all inspirational triumph and training montages. It’s not The Iron Claw, a bleak spiral of generational trauma and ripped abs. Instead, it’s something trickier: a character study about a flawed but driven athlete at the messy dawn of mixed martial arts. That’s the pitch. The reality? A strangely cautious film that ends up less a knockout than a split decision.

On paper, the casting is a stroke of perverse genius. Dwayne Johnson, global superstar and Fast & Furious dad, playing a sweaty, broken man whose biceps aren’t just weapons but also crutches. Johnson has made a career out of being invulnerable—cheerfully indestructible in ways that feel calibrated for four-quadrant appeal. Here, swaddled in facial prosthetics and topped with a hairpiece that looks like it lost its own cage match, he’s aiming for vulnerability. And, occasionally, he gets there: a sobbing breakdown after Kerr’s first defeat, a half-mumbled lament about what fighting gives him that drugs can’t. But Safdie keeps Johnson at arm’s length, shooting him with the wary remove of a documentarian rather than the intimacy of a dramatist. Instead of cracking The Rock, the film just polishes him differently.

Safdie borrows liberally from nonfiction style: Maceo Bishop’s handheld camerawork hovers around ringside, catches faces in the crowd, and stalks Kerr through locker-room corridors with an eavesdropper’s fascination. This is meant to root us in Kerr’s unstable world, but the choice to keep the fights at a literal remove—always outside the ropes, rarely diving in for bruising close-ups—leaves the matches more like historical footnotes than pulse-pounders. You start wondering about the evolving rulebook of late-’90s MMA instead of caring who actually wins.

The personal drama fares little better. Emily Blunt, as Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn, is saddled with a caricature of a role: gum-snapping, glammed-up, alternately clinging and nagging. Their domestic squabbles—whether the milk in a smoothie is whole or skim, whether it’s okay to call your sponsor in front of your girlfriend—play like sitcom reruns laced with opioids. Safdie seems fascinated by their codependency, but the film never decides whether we should root for them, pity them, or just Google “healthy relationship counseling.”

A subplot involving Kerr’s training partner and friend Mark Coleman (played by actual fighter Ryan Bader, who might give the film's best performance) threatens to inject a little human warmth. Their relationship is the most compelling one. Bas Rutten, playing himself as a legendary trainer, brings some real life presence—part fierce mentor, part achy has-been.

The film’s best idea—wrestling with the contradiction between Kerr’s quiet, thoughtful offstage persona and his pulverizing in-ring alter ego—is exactly what made Hyams’ documentary compelling. But instead of finding a new angle on that paradox, Safdie just underlines it with Sharpie: Kerr fights because he has to, Kerr can’t lose, Kerr loves drugs more than Dawn but needs Dawn to make him feel like a man. Rinse and repeat. By the third cycle, you start wishing someone would throw in the towel.

And then there’s the ending. The real Mark Kerr shows up, playing himself in a baffling final scene that has all the weight of a Comic-Con meet-and-greet. Instead of blurring lines between fact and fiction in some profound way, it just underscores how flat the dramatic retelling has been.

Yes, Johnson stretches himself here, and yes, Safdie wants to strip the sports biopic of its usual emotional steroids. But what we’re left with isn’t raw or revealing—it’s oddly hollow. Like an MMA fight viewed from the cheap seats, The Smashing Machine looks authentic, sweats authenticity, but never lands the emotional punch.

3/5