The Smashing Machine (2025)
A24 has waded into mixed martial arts territory with The Smashing Machine, and the result is less sports drama than psychological endurance test. Which is fitting, really, given that director Benny Safdie has built his reputation on making audiences squirm in their seats. This time the discomfort stems not from botched robberies or unhinged gambling spirals, but from watching a man’s body hold up far better than his mind.
The film tracks Mark Kerr’s career through the lawless late-1990s Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) landscape, when the sport resembled something closer to organised street fighting than the regulated enterprise it would eventually become. Kerr dominated in the cage. Outside it, prescription painkillers and subsequently harder substances dominated him. That’s the arc, stripped down. Dwayne Johnson plays Kerr, and if you’re expecting the charismatic eyebrow gymnastics he’s built an empire on, prepare for disappointment. In a good way.
Johnson has gained weight, adopted a shambling gait that suggests accumulated damage, and found something genuinely vulnerable in his bearing. The transformation goes beyond physical. His Kerr understands he’s exceptional at hurting people but remains perpetually confused about why that skill set hasn’t translated into any meaningful control over his own life. It’s the best work Johnson has done, I’d argue, and it should put to rest any debate about whether he can actually act when the material demands it.
Safdie, working solo without brother Josh for the first time in a narrative feature, hasn’t softened his approach. The fights are shot with unflinching clarity, each impact landing with documentary weight. But they’re never the focus, more like punctuation in a longer sentence about what happens when society lionises violence then acts surprised when the violent struggle with peace. The 1990s setting does considerable work here. This was Mixed Martial Arts’s (MMA) awkward adolescence, fighters treated as both spectacle and pariah, celebrated in the moment then left to manage their own wreckage.
Emily Blunt brings depth to Dawn Staples, Kerr’s partner, though the script saddles her with the eternal partner-of-troubled-man dilemma: be supportive, look worried, repeat. She does more with the role than it perhaps deserves, but you finish the film wishing Safdie had trusted her with a fuller arc. The supporting players acquit themselves well enough, including a surprisingly restrained performance from, yes, another wrestler-turned-actor in the role of Kerr’s training partner.
The third act stumbles somewhat. After dwelling extensively in the darkness, the film seems almost embarrassed by the possibility of recovery, rushing through redemption beats that warranted more attention. You sense Safdie’s aversion to anything resembling conventional uplift, which is admirable in principle but leaves certain threads feeling truncated. It’s as though he’s more comfortable with descent than ascent.
Maceo Bishop’s cinematography drains every frame of glamour. Dingy gyms, fluorescent corridors, motel rooms that exist only for sleeping and leaving. It’s visual storytelling that respects its subject without exploiting his pain for pretty pictures, which feels appropriate given the material.
What The Smashing Machine achieves, beyond functioning as a sports biopic, is something more unsettling: a consideration of bodies as tools, of the peculiar bargain involved in being celebrated for violence, of the isolation that accompanies discovering that physical supremacy offers zero defence against interior collapse. It’s flawed, occasionally heavy-handed in its messaging, but anchored by a performance that confirms what some suspected. Given the right material and a director willing to push him, Johnson has genuine range. That alone justifies the ticket price.