The Smashing Machine (2025)
Written & Directed by Benny Safdie. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, and Ryan Bader.
The best sports movies aren’t about the outcome of a specific sporting event. I enjoy Miracle as much as the next guy, but Rocky sticks in my mind a lot more, chiefly because in the film’s final moments, the title character loses the fight, yet the direction, score, and editing all shape it as a triumph. Rocky has had his “big break” into the world of boxing at the highest level, and he has the woman he loves at his side. In the movie’s eyes, he wins, regardless of the outcome of his bout with Apollo Creed.
Until this week, the most recent sports movie to win me over this way was The Iron Claw, a movie that is totally unconcerned with whether or not any member of the Von Erich wins a particular match.1 It focuses rather on the effect that the sport, and the harsh parenting of retired wrestler Fritz von Urich, had psychologically on brothers Kevin, David, Kerry, and Mike.2
The Smashing Machine is the latest example of this. Mark Kerr’s victories in MMA are tangential to the main story; in fact, Kerr is established to be one of the most dominant fighters in the sport in the opening montage. His ability to win fights is never called into question. The plot isn’t driven forward by the pursuit of a climactic championship, which does take place, but it isn’t handled the way it is Miracle or in a conventional “will they/won’t they” sports drama.
What really gets the story going is actually a draw. After his opponent, Igor, uses an illegal move to submit him, Kerr first non-victory in professional MMA is declared “no contest.” This cracks Kerr’s unstoppable persona. He ramps up his painkiller usage and takes out his frustrations on his girlfriend, Dawn. In their biggest fight yet, Kerr accuses Dawn of treating him like a child. “I just want you to treat me like a man,” he says, and as they make up, she whispers softly in his ear that he’s her “big, strong man.”
This is where Safdie tells us what this movie is about. Mark Kerr’s whole life has been built around being the largest, strongest, most powerful person he knows. He talks about defeating opponents like he is asserting personal, almost spiritual domination over them. Yet it’s all in pursuit of assuaging his insecure feeling of not being a man.3
What we might call Kerr’s “toxic masculinity,” to use a phrase that everyone on the Internet is completely normal about, is never a character flaw he grows out of. This is no Hero’s Journey. When he gets out of rehab for drug abuse, he makes it everyone’s problem to cater to his “new self,” especially Dawn’s. His self-centeredness in their relationship is brought to a head in The Smashing Machine’s cleverest moment: Dawn accuses him of caring only for himself and demands he answer the question, “What do you even know about me?” At this moment, the audience tries to anticipate what he might say, what he could say…and we realize that we don’t know anything about her either. Safdie has deliberately underdeveloped her character to make us complicit in Kerr’s neglect. We instinctively feel the guilt over this that Kerr does not.
Dawn suffers so much that later in this same argument, she attempts suicide. First responders take her away, and Kerr resumes business as usual, preparing for his biggest fight since rehab, a major heavyweight championship in Japan, the site of his no contest years earlier. This is the aforementioned climax of which many sports movies would hang everything in the balance. Kerr seems destined to face his best friend and training partner, Coleman, in the semifinal, then rematch Igor for the top prize and “a life-changing amount of money.”
Yet the story takes an off-ramp hard. Kerr is defeated in the round prior to fighting Coleman. He’s taken off the chessboard in his own movie. Here we see a glimmer of perhaps the barest growth in Kerr’s character: Instead of lashing out, he gives Coleman his blessing and cheers him on to win the tournament. He even permits himself to laugh in the shower, content with the outcome.
This psychological anatomy of a professional “smashing machine” is perfect for the Rock’s first significant venture into real acting. He fits right into a cast made up, in the Safdie fashion, of real members of the martial arts community: Ryan Bader, Oleksandr Usyk, and Bas Rutten as himself. While this isn’t the performance of the year, the Rock still far outdoes himself and sets a precedent for commendable acting in his future.
Benny Safdie’s first directorial venture without his brother, Josh, is flawed, lacking the sharpness of Uncut Gems and the intensity of Good Time, but it shines as a simple prestige drama that I hope will pave the way for a fascinating solo filmography to come.
A movie about professional wrestling that was concerned with this would be absurd anyway.
It occurs to me as I write that both of my positive examples toward my thesis are about combat sports, as is the subject of this review. I’ll have to do a survey of the broader genre at some point to see if this correlation between fighting and stronger writing is a real one.
This makes it an interesting companion piece to The Iron Claw, which also probes the relationship between masculinity and fighting for sport.