Six years ago in this space, I began my review of the Safdie brothers’ stress-migraine classic Uncut Gems with the confession that, despite having been a teenage boy in the 1990s, I had zero affection for the comic stylings of Adam Sandler. Now, as I prepare to review Benny Safdie’s solo debut, the Dwayne Johnson dramatic vehicle The Smashing Machine, a similar disclaimer: I do not give the teensiest, tiniest tin shit about professional wrestling. Plenty of people who I respect delight in it, and I’m truly happy for them, but I simply cannot find the entertainment in it; to me it’s like eating cardboard, or listening to a playlist filled with nothing but radiator hiss.* But just as his earlier effort made me not just appreciate the nuances of an Adam Sandler performance, Safdie’s newest has managed to hold the attention of this avowed wrestling skeptic. While it’s not quite up to the level of its predecessor, it’s kind of a fascinating piece of work.
By the numbers, The Smashing Machine is more or less your standard sports biopic: you’ve got your rise-fall-rise narrative structure, your recreations of iconic matches, your tumultuous relationship with the one woman who understands our hero better than he understands himself. Mr. The Rock Johnson stars as Mark Kerr, one of the earliest stars of the mixed martial arts league which would come to be known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship. We follow Kerr from low-budget bouts in dive bars and function halls to the arenas of Tokyo, where the sport began to flourish. By his side is his long-suffering girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), forced to manage her other half’s demons (primarily steroid and painkiller addiction, both harrowing but understandable for a man in his field) as well as her own.
So far, so Rocky. But what Safdie brings to the table is a texture, a look and feel very much unlike the stereotypical guts-and-glory dad film. The opening scenes are presented in faux-VHS grain, as if we’re watching a thirdhand bootleg which has been passed from fight fanatic to fight fanatic. Safdie drops this conceit early on, but the film retains an appealing analog fuzz. There is a constant din of background noise, from traffic whizzing by outside during domestic disputes to “Every Morning” by Sugar Ray cheerily blaring through a hospital waiting room while Kerr nurses a broken face. Likewise, the visuals take on a disquieting fluorescent pallor befitting a sport which came of age in backrooms and illicit venues, and scenes unspool with a languid, off-kilter naturalism. This wooziness is enhanced by an outstanding score by avant-garde jazz harpist Nala Sinephro (who also provides an ethereal on-screen rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” before the climactic bout). It’s a sensory experience designed to place us in the head of a man who gets punched in the face for a living— and it’s far less unpleasant than that sounds.
I have spent much of the past decade actively dreading the prospect of a Dwayne Johnson Oscar campaign, but I do have to admit he is excellently deployed here. We recognize the I’m-just-a-teddy-bear sweetness of his pre-fight interviews— it appears to be a trait both fighters share— as well as the pathological inability to admit weakness (when an interview asks what he’ll do if he loses, Kerr claims to not understand the question— shades of the Black Adam press tour). But even these familiar tics come off as strange and uncanny coming through the mountains of hamburger-like prosthetics. One senses makeup has been applied less to make Johnson look like Mark Kerr (which he doesn’t really, as we learn in a postscript featuring the genuine article) than to distort his own visage. It allows Johnson to drop some of his defenses, to let some humanity creep back into his well-manicured charisma. I don’t know if it’s the best performance of the year, but it is a real performance, a reminder that, when he wants to, Johnson can genuinely act.
Blunt, unfortunately, is less convincing as Kerr’s better half. It’s not that she’s bad, necessarily, but where Johnson’s against-type performance is rooted in shared experience, hers feels much more calculated. The role requires Blunt to first strip down her undeniable movie-star glamour, then build it back up into a white-trash simulacrum of the same; Blunt doesn’t quite manage this journey, and never comes off as anything but a gorgeous, world-famous actress doing a brassy American dialect. It’s hard not to compare her performance to Julia Fox’s revelatory breakout turn in Uncut Gems, which felt lived-in and vulnerable and unpredictable in ways Blunt’s does not. For that matter, consider Blunt’s other co-star, real-life fighter Ryan “Darth” Bader, immensely real and likable as Kerr’s meathead mensch of a best friend. Much of the “Safdie touch” lies in the brothers’ talent in casting recontextualized A-listers alongside found-object non-actors, but somehow Blunt can’t quite swing the alchemy.
Because The Smashing Machine does adhere so closely to the traditional structure of the sports film, what you take away from it will likely depend on your relationship with the genre. Speaking personally, I have just barely more interest in wrestling pictures than I do in wrestling itself, but while I could take or leave the story, I was quite taken with the film as a mood piece. While it doesn’t quite reach the delirious highs of Uncut Gems (its other co-director’s upcoming sports biopic looks like it may hit closer to that mark), The Smashing Machine is a deceptively idiosyncratic piece of work, and makes a case for the younger Safdie’s solo career as a Hollywood subversive. It hasn’t made a wrestling fan out of me, but it also did not bore me, and that’s probably as close as we’ll get to a TKO.
* – Here people who know me will likely interject that they could easily imagine me listening to a playlist worth of radiator hiss, and they’re probably right.
The Smashing Machine
2025
dir. Benny Safdie
123 min.
Opens Friday, 10/3 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Apple Cinemas Cambridge, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and all local AMCs
