Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) sits at the upper echelons of the Ultimate Fighting Championship in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  His success in the ring, however, does not translate to his personal life as he is in a very fraught relationship with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt).  As the sport continues to evolve, it threatens to leave Mark behind, and the aging fighter finds himself turning to drugs to dull the pain from a lifetime of being hit instead of confiding in Dawn, now his wife, but just like when he was in the ring, he refuses to tap out and will see this fight through to the end. 

Benny Safdie writes and directs The Smashing Machine for A24 which debuted at the Venice International Film Festival where it won the Silver Lion.  Running 123 minutes, the film chronicles about a 4 year span during a transitory part of Kerr’s storied career as a championship fighter.  In addition to Kerr having a short cameo as himself in the final scene of the film, casting director Jennifer Venditti lends additional authenticity to the narrative by including other UFC names such as Ryan Bader, Oleksandr Usyk, and Bas Rutten filling out the roles of Mark Coleman, Igor Vovchanchyn, and Rutten as himself. 

The title came attached with lots of buzzy baggage in its leadup being the first film to be directed by a single Safdie brother – with Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme (2025) debuting across the holiday frame – as well as touting a career pivot for Johnson who is now looking to take on more prestigious roles.  No doubt that the wrestler-turned-actor was able to find some parallels between his own time in the ring and Kerr’s, albeit different leagues and styles, which certainty helped him tap into some of the more nuanced parts of the role and lend some credence to the action of the film.  Unfortunately, Safdie’s writing does not give Johnson much of a character to build, and instead spends the pages of the script creating scenarios to paint Mark as a gentle giant figure.  This is all well and good, and can be used to pull back the curtain a little on the sport in a similar vein as Darren Aronofsky did in The Wrestler (2008), but when Safdie’s thesis is delivered within the first twenty minutes of an over two hour long film by a woman in a doctor’s waiting room asking if Mark must really hate whoever he is in the ring against only to be told no, there is little else for him to take the story.  We believe Mark’s words, proven through his actions, time and time again so even when he struggles with addition, it never feels like the true betrayal of character and trust the the film wants us to believe it is. Further, this waiting room scene is even featured in the trailer, and while the film could be used as a window to see how the fighters balance their respect for one another with the inherent violence of the sport, Safdie is content to leave his examination surface level at best and dig no further.  This weak treatment dilutes Johnson’s performance since he has such a short and ill-defined arc to travel that even his franchise characters have more depth to them because they need to support multiple sequels and spinoffs. 

What is most frustrating about this narrative choice is that Safdie does scratch upon an interesting angle into this story, but seems almost wholly oblivious to it.  The key to really unlocking something special here would have been to elevate Blunt’s Dawn from the role of thankless wife to our entry point into the World According to Mark, not dissimilar from the same demystifying approach that Sophia Coppola employed in Priscilla (2023) which told the story of living life playing by Elvis Presley’s rules.  Blunt is afforded the most interesting scenes across the entire runtime as they tend to deal with emotionally cutting themes, and while there is a version of these scenes, lifted verbatim from the final cut, that perhaps read as if she did not actually love Mark, we do not see enough of Mark explaining things as mundane as how he would like his smoothies prepared to actually believe she is anything except invested in this relationship.  Because Safdie is so committed to showing Mark as someone who does no wrong, he completely undermines the entire emotional core of the film, escapes being labeled as a narcissist simply because he can charm his way through a room, and this all frames Dawn as the de facto villain in this tale, though not through any real fault of her own. Her big moment comes late in the film when, after pushed beyond her breaking point with Mark, pulls a gun she had hidden under the mattress and intends to take her own life. Not only is this Blunt’s big scene, but the entire disarming sequence is one of the few electric moments of the entire film. Had this story not been tied to memoir and instead be able to fully explore its themes in the world of fiction, a much strong ending could have been arrived at, here, but again, Safdie does little to justify why we are following Mark – or, more specifically, why we are following Mark at this stage in life – and the film continues to fizzle away until at long last the credits begin to roll.

The Smashing Machine is an interesting work if not an entirely successful one.  It lacks the same manic tension that coursed through Safdie’s previous joint efforts with his brother, though it exists in a world that very much feels like it is fighting with all its will against that shot of adrenaline.  As such, when Maceo Bishop’s camera observes the action in the ring, we can not help but get wrapped up in the excitement and thrill of the sport, but outside of the ring, his movements takes on a much more relaxed pace, floating and handheld.  This faux documentary approach becomes incredibly obtrusive, and instead of enveloping us into Mark’s world, it actually pushes us away and reenforces the artificial nature of it all.  Coupled with production designer James Chinlund’s purposefully stale settings and colors in its wood paneled walls and grungy carpeted floors, this film lacks the opulence on the screen to be a tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun and the nuance on the page to be the monkey’s paw tightening around a rising star that risked it all to stay at the top.  It is unclear, uncommitted, and unfocused, and in the same way those characteristics are the makings for a losing fight in the ring, they make for a real slog of a film as audiences fight to stay awake in their seats.  Uniform in its approach, it can not be said that The Smashing Machine is lazy filmmaking, just misguided and unsure of itself.