Part bio pic, part history of professional mixed martial arts fighting, “The Smashing Machine” (2025) dramatizes the documentary, “The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr” (2002), and marks Benny Safdie’s first solo directorial debut without his brother Josh. Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, plays Mark Kerr from 1997 through 2000 from his undefeated rise in Brazil to his first bump in the road at Pride in Japan in 1999. The loss exacerbates his already rocky relationship with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt), and increases his addiction to painkilling opioids. Will he learn how to lose and stop getting high from the adulation of the crowd?
Johnson is almost unrecognizable as the soft-spoken giant. When “The Smashing Machine” opens, Safdie starts at a distance through Kerr’s first televised fight with a voiceover of an interview thus contrasting the mountain of a man with the thoughtful commentary of Kerr’s reflections on the sport and insights of his strategy. Gradually Safdie stops showing Kerr’s exterior and starts to reveal the man when he does not have his game face on, and it is not much different. Like a lot of big guys, he is conscious of being approachable, loquacious and gentle so people do not fear him. For a lot of the movie, the unspoken question is when does he become human and lose his cool? Then when he does, what is he like?
One person determined to answer that question is Dawn. After watching “The Smashing Machine,” some may still consider Blunt too high class to play a fighter’s girlfriend, but it was nice to see Blunt turn into a tanned, overly made up and highly stylized woman. Initially they seem sweet with his understanding that she is a show pony, not a work horse. Gradually her sabotage of his biggest days becomes apparent as she forces his hand to choose between his profession and her. When she is dismissive of his various heartbreaks or concerns, it is obvious to anyone except Kerr that he should probably keep looking. While not as bad as “Dead of Winter” (2025), there is a good wife, bad wife moral to the story, but Dawn was also a real person and not everyone is cut out to be the significant other of an exacting, disciplined athlete and a famous person. In the eleventh hour, Dawn’s issues cut deeper than anything to do with Kerr. While it is easy to hate her, she is not a character, but a human being. The last time that Blunt worked with Safdie, she was giving his character the stink eye in “Oppenheimer” (2023), and this role may be her messiest to date.
The real heart of “The Smashing Machine” is Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader, who is a mixed martial artist in real life), Kerr’s friend, coach and competitor. It is really a story of friendship, and Kerr only learns to lose because of their unconditional love and acceptance of each other. Kerr and Coleman are foils for each other. Kerr’s descent corresponds with Coleman’s rise. There is only one glimpse of Coleman’s homelife as a father happily playing with his daughter while his wife is off to the side with a crying baby. She is almost invisible unlike the eternally visible Dawn. Coleman drops everything when Kerr needs him. The two most beautiful scenes are when Kerr finally drops the crap and cries in front of his friend and when Kerr introduces Coleman to the adulation of the crowd, which proves that an earlier interview with Kerr in which he said that he did not hate his competitors was not just talk. Their relationship is one of positive masculinity where they are each other’s biggest cheerleaders.
Another example of positive masculinity is between Kerr and his California based Dutch trainer, Bas Rutten, who plays himself and is also a fearsome mixed martial arts fighter in real life. More interesting than the training montages are the scenes when Bas physically and verbally consoles Kerr after a fight. Do people enter this profession for the tender loving care and unconditional love? Similarly, Kerr springs to action when Bas is suddenly struck with searing pain and is willing to risk his reputation to alleviate it. Rutten has some great silent scenes, especially when Dawn returns to distract the willing Kerr. Are all mixed martial artists good actors?
Safdie shoots the film in the visual style of the era. It is a rough, grainy quality that adds to the realism of “The Smashing Machine.” He denies the audience’s desire to appreciate the artistry of the fighters so if you are a fan of the sport, do not expect to see a lot of hits land, which makes for a great artst fartsy film and prioritizes the emotion over the gamesmanship, but could be frustrating if a MMA fan decides to splurge for movie tickets then gets a shaky cam instead and denied a real view of the action.
“The Smashing Machine” also may be too long. It begins to feel as if it will never end and stubbornly restricts Kerr’s life to gym, work and home with the same faces at play and the cat only making one appearance at their New Mexico home otherwise it is just Kerr and Dawn. The exception is one scene at an amusement park where the couple’s differing demeanors functions as further proof of their incompatibility. Many are calling this film the anti-sports bio pic, which is fair since it stubbornly refuses to show Kerr’s medical emergency when it is a moment of embarrassment and fragility, but what does he do on Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. Does he have a family? There is not a sense of his normal life when he is not high and in a stupor other than the nightmare of his relationship, but they were on a break. Every sad wrestling film (“Foxcatcher,” “The Iron Claw,” “Cassandro”) usually gives a sense of quotidian routine, but that does not exist here, and it may be the poorer for it.
At the end of “The Smashing Machine,” the movie fast forwards and shows the real-life Kerr at the supermarket just being normal, which was truly refreshing. Maybe Safdie only wanted to show that side of his life at the end like a breath of fresh air and reward or to show that Kerr deserved more than the life of a normal guy. It was a mistake. Johnson in the doctor’s office was gold, and when he was just walking the streets of Tokyo shopping, it showed a hopeful, innocent side of Kerr.
“The Smashing Machine” is a solid movie, but it is not the kind of film that you will want to watch repeatedly. It slightly revises “Billy Bathgate” story, witnessing the fall of a great man. While it does not let him crash and burn, it also refuses to show us the landing. To truly defy tropes, it is not enough to do the opposite. You must proactively tell a new story.
Random trivia: second major movie to reference kintsugi. The first was “Splitsville” (2025) though it does not quite work as well here.
