Walking out of the Venice screening of The Smashing Machine, the mood in the theater was striking. Some people were silent, almost dazed. Others argued loudly in the aisles. That says a lot about Benny Safdie’s film: it doesn’t try to please everyone. Instead, it drags you into Mark Kerr’s world — and it doesn’t let you out easily.
This isn’t a feel-good sports drama, and anyone expecting a Rocky-style triumph will be disappointed. What Safdie has crafted is closer to a tragedy. And at the heart of it is Dwayne Johnson, who leaves behind the action-hero swagger and bares something far more fragile.
Mark Kerr: A Life on the Edge
If you followed MMA in the late 1990s, you probably remember Mark Kerr. A terrifying presence in the cage, a man they called The Smashing Machine. On paper he was unstoppable — Pride FC tournaments, UFC dominance — but outside the cage, things were far messier.
He lived with constant pain, numbing it with opioids, and tried to balance a turbulent relationship with Dawn Staples. The more success he had, the more it seemed to hollow him out. HBO’s 2002 documentary captured that contradiction brilliantly, and Safdie knows he can’t escape its shadow. His answer is not to compete with it but to bring the audience so close that we can almost feel the sweat, the bruises, the desperation.
Safdie’s Direction
Safdie doesn’t go in for the typical sports-movie tricks. No inspirational montages, no clean-cut victories. He shows Kerr in fragments: training until his body buckles, arguing with Dawn in motel rooms, staring at pill bottles in silence.
The camera lingers uncomfortably close, as though afraid to blink. It reminded me at times of Uncut Gems, but here the chaos is quieter, more suffocating. You don’t feel the rush of adrenaline; you feel the weight of exhaustion.
The Smashing Machine: Dwayne Johnson’s Transformation
I’ll admit, I was skeptical when Johnson was announced for this role. He’s built a career on charm, on invulnerability. Could he really disappear into a man as broken as Mark Kerr? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.
On screen, Johnson’s physicality is still enormous, but it no longer feels empowering. It feels heavy, almost tragic, as if the very muscles that made Kerr famous are now dragging him down. His movements are slower, more deliberate. His eyes tell the real story: tired, defensive, searching for a way out.
Gone are the raised eyebrows, the quick jokes, the crowd-pleasing Rock persona. What’s left is a man who doesn’t know how much longer he can keep going. Watching Johnson like this, you realize how much he’s been holding back in his career. It’s the kind of performance that makes you re-evaluate an actor you thought you already knew.
Emily Blunt as Dawn
Emily Blunt deserves just as much credit. As Dawn, she isn’t a bystander to Kerr’s collapse — she’s caught in it. There are moments where her love feels genuine, and others where it curdles into anger. You can see her clinging to hope even as she’s crushed by disappointment.
One scene that stuck with me shows her begging Kerr to stop with the pills. It could have played melodramatic, but Blunt grounds it with a mixture of fury and heartbreak. The fight that follows feels so real you almost want to look away.
The Fights
If you’re coming for polished, Hollywood-style MMA sequences, you’ll be shocked. The fights here are rough, unglamorous, sometimes even awkward. And that’s the point. Every punch looks painful, every grapple exhausting. Safdie refuses to give you a cathartic knockout. Victories feel empty, because the real battle is happening inside Kerr’s head.
Addiction as the Real Opponent
What the film ultimately drives home is that addiction was Kerr’s fiercest rival. Safdie never treats it as a subplot; it’s the spine of the entire story. The rituals are small and mundane — another pill, another excuse, another fight postponed — but they add up to something devastating. Watching Johnson act out these private defeats is almost harder than watching the cage fights.
Comparisons to the Documentary
Of course, anyone who’s seen the 2002 HBO film will ask: did we need this version? The answer is complicated. On the one hand, Safdie brings immediacy that the documentary, for all its brilliance, couldn’t. You feel Kerr’s collaps
e more viscerally here, because fiction lets you live inside his silences and his self-destruction. On the other hand, the film sometimes sticks too closely to its source. A few scenes mirror the documentary so directly that you wonder what new ground is being broken.
For me, the film works best when it takes the raw facts and translates them into something more experiential — less about what happened, more about how it felt. That’s where it steps out of the documentary’s shadow.
The Smashing Machine: Critical Reception
At Venice, the film walked away with the Silver Lion, but the reaction was split right down the middle. Some critics hailed Johnson’s performance as a career-defining turn and praised Safdie for sticking to his uncompromising style. Others found the movie too bleak, too literal, and too tied to the original documentary.
Sitting in the screening, I could see both sides. There were moments where I felt drained, almost resentful of how little relief the film allowed. But there were also moments of piercing honesty that stayed with me long after I left the theater.
Conclusion
The Smashing Machine isn’t a movie that ties everything up with a bow. It leaves you unsettled, maybe even frustrated. But it also leaves you thinking about what it means to be strong, and what it costs to live inside a body built for punishment.
For Dwayne Johnson, this might be the role that finally convinces skeptics he’s more than the world’s most bankable action star. For Safdie, it’s another testament to his fascination with people living on the edge of collapse.
It’s not a film for everyone. But for those willing to sit with its discomfort, The Smashing Machine delivers something rare in modern cinema: a sports drama that dares to be tragic, human, and painfully real.
