The Smashing Machine: Dwayne Johnson is a knockout in Benny Safdie’s un-sensationalist MMA fighter biopic

• Reviewed from the 2025 Venice Film Festival

Without waggling an eyebrow or popping a pec, Dwayne Johnson (formerly and forever The Rock) is so damn good in The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie’s biopic of MMA pioneer Mark Kerr, that you kind of want to take him apart to see how he does it. You want Maceo Bishop’s restless camera to be still on his face long enough to work out where he ends and Kazu Hiro’s prosthetics begin. You want to prod at the very cut gems of his glistening biceps to see how much of that oily, coarse finish comes off and how much is really his skin. You want to understand how tragedy is coiled in the curve of his trapezius – seriously, some of the shots that slalom through the canyons of his gargantuan, muscled back seem like they tell Kerr’s whole story: the striving, the steroids, the sorrow and eventually, the survivorship. Excuse the objectification, but a Machine, like a Rock, is an object. 

Mark Kerr, however, is a real guy, who just happens to be played by a megastar. It’s 1997 when Safdie’s film picks him up, in the ring during one of several impressively crunchy fight scenes. Kerr is a champion wrestler who has never lost a match in the burgeoning sport of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), which is now a billion-dollar enterprise, though at this point has barely blipped on the mainstream radar. But it has set Kerr up with a nice house in Arizona, which he shares with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), and it has given him a close friend, in fellow fighter Mark Coleman (real-life MMA star Ryan Bader). Coleman’s relationship with Kerr becomes the most touching arc in The Smashing Machine possibly because Bader’s non-professional’s reticence plays so well off Johnson’s tamped-down charisma that it has an authenticating halo effect on the whole drama.  

Together, the Marks experience the highs and lows of the circuit, which often takes them to Tokyo where they’re a little ahead of the game with regards to MMA. Not so much, however that there aren’t scenes of Kerr squabbling with the suits over a couple of thousand bucks, or smiling incredulously when he’s told aching fighters are allowed only one heat pack each. Still, it’s all worth it for the sheer ecstasy of winning. “Do you hate the other guy when you fight?” asks a kid in a doctor’s waiting room where Kerr seems to take up ⅘ths of the space. “Absolutely not,” he replies. But, endearingly soft-spoken, gentle soul though he seems, sometimes, when all that stands between him and the drug-like high of victory is his opponent’s face on the mat, you can’t be so sure. 

At first portrayed as little more than a Wonderbra with eyes, Dawn soon asserts herself in the story, sometimes a true source of emotional support, sometimes a royal pain in the ass. But Kerr is no saint either. As his winning streak winds down, he becomes increasingly reliant on steroids and painkillers before checking into rehab and emerging clean, but more single-mindedly focused on his career than ever. The tensions between the pair lead to the film’s least convincing moment, when Dawn goes entirely off the rails. But the scene is jarring only because the rest of the film is so confidently calm, not something we might expect from Safdie, one half of the team that brought you certified panic attacks Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019). Biopics often operate as ghoulish vivisection, but The Smashing Machine treats Kerr, who shows up for a cameo late on, with familiarity, fondness and a strangely reserved respect for his private self. Especially as played by Johnson, he doesn’t need to be torn open for us to find him interesting. 

It is obvious what Johnson gets from The Smashing Machine  – a Safdie/A24-approved indie credibility boost and very possibly an Oscar nomination that can launch him, at 53, into a new phase in his career. But we should also appreciate what The Smashing Machine gets from casting Johnson — as opposed to any other large man who can convincingly give and take an onscreen beating — and that is the metatext of his background, his body and his blockbuster renown despite the nagging feeling that Hollywood has never known quite what to do with him. Johnson adds a dimension to a movie that is already an unusually fine biopic and an unusually un-sensationalist sports movie. He makes it a fascinating essay on physique and fame, in which a guy who almost sacrificed one in the nearly-but-not-quite pursuit of the other, is played, with consummate skill, by a man who is the epitome of both. 

► The Smashing Machine is in UK cinemas 3 October.