
Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Venice coverage. The Smashing Machine arrives in theaters on October 3.
The Smashing Machine is a movie with a lot of heart and soul. It’s also a movie with great love for its subjects: the people involved and, for better and worse, the industry they helped build. It’s inspired by a 2002 HBO documentary of the same name and boasts a central performance from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Mark Kerr, a veteran of the “no holds barred” combat circuit that eventually matured into the more lucrative UFC (albeit long after Kerr had exited the ring). I’m mostly happy to report that it’s a far weirder movie than it needed to be––an art film masquerading as a tried-and-tested staple that’s seldom less-than-interesting but also rarely charged with the tension of the best sports movies.
The Smashing Machine was written, edited, and directed by a newly solo Benny Safdie, who makes a clear point of abstracting the genre’s familiar beats––you won’t find any fateful knockouts, pyrrhic victories, or overtly heroic defeats here. The obvious comparison is Darron Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, a movie that did for Mickey Rourke what The Smashing Machine might yet do for Johnson. The WWE-star-turned-Hollywood-heavyweight has spent the last couple years refocusing his career after the crushing personal and financial disappointment of Black Adam. I’m keen to hear what the actor will have to say about Safdie’s direction; not for the first time in his career, it feels as if he’s ended up in a movie that’s more artistically daring than the script might have let on.
Regardless of its flaws, this is an interesting place to be: the kind of movie that is certainly worth seeing, if one I can’t say I’m fully convinced by. One of the biggest tasks for Safdie was to find a way to square Johnson’s megawatt personality with a movie that takes humility as its North Star. The director’s approach is distancing the audience from the actor, filming (with The Curse DP Maceo Bishop) in medium shots and only allowing us brief glimpses of Kerr’s inner life, which are of ocurse the movie’s finest moments. We get a hint of this in a disarming sequence early on, when he politely asks that an airplane’s window shade be left open so he can admire the sunset. In another (perhaps the movie’s best moment) Safdie cuts between close-ups of Kerr as he watches a demolition derby. Admiring the sequence at this morning’s press screening, I began to sense a kind of tortured empathy for all those bruised chassis taking hit after hit to the delight of a baying (and paying) mob.
What the movie ultimately offers is a love letter to the unsung heroes of sport’s toughest margins. Set in the last few years of the ’90s, the plot follows an age-old structure––there is an undefeated record at stake, a drug meltdown in the middle, and a significant fight near the close––but plays at a steady, melancholic clip, punctuated by a brilliant (if sometimes abstracting) score by experimental jazz musician Nala Sinephro. It’s the same cosmic vibe that the director and his brother Josh brought to their earlier sports picture Uncut Gems, but that movie used the meanest tricks in the book to make sure you were relentlessly glued to the screen until the very last breath. Much of The Smashing Machine is focused on Kerr’s participation in Japan’s Pride league, but I can sooner recall the lovely image of Johnson looking lost on a Tokyo escalator than the details of any particular fight. (It will be fascinating to see if that side of the partnership is more evident in Josh’s upcoming Marty Supreme.)
For a sporting movie featuring a cast of real MMA veterans (as well as prizefighter Oleksandr Usyk) it struck me as a little indifferent to the events themselves, regardless of how beautifully lit and shot they are. (As a sports fan who’s never been particularly taken by UFC, the movie did little to change my mind. But I’m aware that this could be entirely subjective.) The most consequential fight scenes––the domestic disputes between Kerr and his girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt)––are less convincing still. Though Blunt’s casting presumably comes downstream of the duo’s Jungle Cruise, I’m not convinced that the performances complement each other here, despite the obvious chemistry––though the similarities in Blunt’s accent and mannerisms to Mikey Madison’s in Anora are nothing if not a curiosity.
Splitting the difference between Kerr’s also-ran career and a challenging period in his personal life (both of which make his cameo a welcome one), the movie never achieves a real sense of urgency, but the fault is not Johnson’s to bear. The actor is relentlessly watchable, disappearing into the role while managing to locate Kerr’s towering vulnerability even as he’s felling doors with a single swing of his fist. The movie premieres tonight at the Venice Film Festival, where Johnson can expect the kind of ovation that the celebrity-enthralled Salle Grande crowds tend to reserve for such comebacks––think Rourke’s Wrestler, Fraser’s Whale, and Keaton’s Birdman. Good for him.
The Smashing Machine premiered at the Venice Film Festival and opens on October 3.
The post The Smashing Machine Review: An Impressive Dwayne Johnson Softens Benny Safdie’s Drama first appeared on The Film Stage.