THE SMASHING MACHINE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Smashing Machine, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2025

It's easy enough to understand what writer/director Benny Safdie is doing with The Smashing Machine, especially once its real-life epilogue arrives. Here's what looks to be an inspirational sports drama about a man facing a few personal and professional struggles, building up to a championship fight that would prove his worth, and on a course toward going head-to-head against his best friend in the process.

If this story was the subject of a wholly fictional movie, it would almost certainly go only one way. Since Safdie is working with the life story of mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Mark Kerr, it also can go only one way. Theoretically, the dramatic tension is expecting the former but witnessing the latter.

As some text (among a good amount of it) during that coda explains, Kerr may be one of the early stars of the burgeoning sport of MMA fighting, but since it wasn't anywhere near as popular as it today, the sport's "pioneers," as the epilogue calls them, and their stories aren't as well-known or celebrated as its contemporary stars. Kerr's history, then, likely arrives in this dramatized form as a bit of a mystery to most (even though the movie itself is based on a 2002 made-for-TV documentary that covers the same events). Because the movie—even in its faux-documentary style—more or less follows and focuses on the usual bits of the sports-movie formula, Safdie sets our expectations in a certain way, too.

The problem with all of this, perhaps, is that the entire movie depends on its payoff to make the point Safdie wants to make. Until that point, we're just watching a pretty standard inspirational sports movie—and a particularly hollow one, at that.

There's no real sense of who Kerr, played by Dwayne Johnson, is in this story, except a generally nice guy who happens to beat up other men for a living, has some troubles with addiction and a toxic romantic relationship that bring out another side of him, and cannot even hypothesize what it might be like to lose a fight. That last part might be a fascinating angle from which to approach this dramatized version of the man, but this ultimately is a movie that's more interested in events than the people involved in them.

The most telling example of that might be a specific three-scene section of Safdie's screenplay and editing. It comes after Mark's addiction to an opioid-based pain medication can no longer be ignored. Off-screen, his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) had found him unresponsive on the floor of their home, called for an ambulance, and seen him off to the hospital. After a heart-to-heart with his best friend and fellow MMA fighter Mark Coleman (real-life fighter Ryan Bader), Mark decides to go to a rehabilitation facility.

The movie shows him arriving, cuts to an interview with his friend about his absence at an MMA event in Tokyo, and, finally, returns to the facility, where Dawn is happily waiting to pick up her beau. When the movie skips over what turns out to be a key shift for this character, it's difficult to believe that Safdie cares about his protagonist's addiction and recovery in any way beyond serving as an obstacle within this story.

The whole movie has a similar feeling, really. We first meet Mark at an MMA tournament in Brazil, where a montage shows him pummeling assorted opponents with his wrestling moves, as some voice-over has the man explaining why fighting means so much to him. It's about as deep an insight as we get, and soon enough, Mark's life becomes a pattern.

He fights in the ring, mostly in Japan (where the sport is more accepted, since it's featuring some vaguely explained legal challenges in the United States), and then fights some problem outside of it. The painkillers are the first obvious personal struggle, as he hides injections in the bathroom and eventually stops caring about trying to hide it at all. Again, the screenplay bypasses most of this process, simply to get back to the storytelling expectation.

After going to rehab, the big barrier becomes Dawn, who doesn't exist in this story as a character whose thinking and behavior are meant to be understood. The movie frames her as a nag, a scold, and someone who's so desperate for attention that she seems to rub Mark's recovery in his face, uses her support of her boyfriend as a weapon, and, in some final moments, takes it all several steps further. All of this may be accurate, either in reality or from Mark and his friends' perspectives, but such a broad depiction of an important character in this story reveals just how shallow the movie's point of view on these characters is.

Everything else in the narrative follows the usual formula. We get the requisite training montage, the fights, and the build-up to the climactic tournament, where everyone assumes the two friends will have to face each other (There is an amusing beat in which some commentators' hyping of the grudge between the Marks is undercut by them sitting and joking about the tournament's program). The Smashing Machine follows this to the letter, only to do something different when it's far too late to actually make anything of that development.

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