No Easy Fights
By Sam Bodrojan
The Smashing Machine
Dir. Benny Safdie, U.S., A24
An unflinching examination of one man’s love affair with death, The Smashing Machine adopts the silhouette of a conventional sports movie. Mark Kerr—an early star of the MMA and the figure around which the movie orbits—is nothing like the archetypes we prescribe to fighters. He does not speak with the narrow determination of an athlete or move with the rehearsed braggadocio of a WWE performer. He is kind but calculated. In civilian settings, he carries his body with a certain reticence. He seeks to build a life of stability out of vices and hedonism and self-destruction. The fights are upsetting beyond being merely gruesome. These men fling themselves at one another with a force that has been steadily trained out of the sport in the subsequent quarter-century. Their faces twist against the mat as if gravity is heavier in the ring. The zoom on the SD video flattens the surrounding late-nineties ephemera—the strip mall doctors’ offices and La-Z-Boys. The camera looks upon these spaces without judgment or manipulative catharsis.
I am not talking about The Smashing Machine, the 2025 biopic directed by Benny Safdie, but John Hyams’s 2002 documentary of the same name, and the source material for Safdie’s film. A faithful recreation of Hyams’s doc, the movie occasionally replicates elements as granular as specific shot compositions or off-hand remarks. Starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Mark Kerr, the film follows the fighter between 1997 and 2000. Over these years, Kerr goes from undefeated champion to a recovering addict who amounts to nothing special. He is flanked on either side of the ropes by the two most important relationships in his life. One, his professional rival and best friend Mark Coleman, played by Ryan Bader; the other, his girlfriend Dawn Starr, is played by Emily Blunt.
Not since Gus Van Sant’s Psycho has such an artistically redundant project been greenlit. Safdie’s signature visual panache is almost entirely absent, replaced by a limp frame-matching of Hyams's images. The fights are anemically choreographed, with any of the nascent MMA’s brutality sanitized and unimaginatively filmed. Graphic footage of Kerr injecting heroin, a morally dubious but effectively paralyzing inclusion in the documentary, carries little weight in its restaging. The first film had a wonky structure due to Kerr’s career and personal life often stagnating or regressing; the intimacy of its style often undermined an expected arc to haunting effect. Squeezed into something resembling a normal screenplay, though, the story finds its momentum repeatedly derailed by its attachment to accuracy.
None of this is aided by Safdie’s alterations, which further throw his remake’s balance out of whack. The main addition is an increased focus on the romantic subplot, which is a disaster. Blunt plays Dawn like a cartoon mob wife. Though tensions around her drinking and Kerr’s new sobriety drive much of the film’s second half, Safdie elides explicit mention of Dawn’s own experience with recovery and relapse, rendering Blunt’s antics as the hysteria of a woman under duress. The most heightened parts of the film are not under floodlights and fog machines, but within the noxious orange walls of the couple’s Phoenix residence. The climax of the film, an argument set to the entirety of Springsteen’s “Jungleland,” is a bizarre and overwrought miscalculation, as if the ironic juxtaposition could drown out the hackneyed melodrama.
Real fighters are everywhere you look in The Smashing Machine. Anyone who shows up on-screen with their knuckles wrapped is a professional boxer, wrestler, or martial artist. UFC legend Bas Rutten plays himself. These men clearly have a passion for the material, but they are not actors, delivering their lines with a rehearsed but unemotive casualness. The effect is stultifying.
If there is anything worth salvaging in this movie, it is Johnson’s performance. His turn as Kerr has already been showered in accolades, but the inevitable awards campaign threatens to miscategorize its precise virtues. It is not just that Johnson is serious, or committed, or playing against type. It is not just that you forget you are looking at a guy whose face has been a global memetic fixture for as long as I can remember. It is that he turns in straightforwardly terrific performance, offering a selflessness and maniacal willingness to bare ugliness in his soul, to make the honest choice over the showy one.
Johnson embodies this ethos from his shoulders to his thighs, but especially his eyes. When someone’s on heroin, their eyes glaze over but do not defocus. It is not about the drowsy escape, it is the pleasure of balancing, for a moment, the mundane cruelties of life against an unstoppable contentment. This is usually played as spiritual catatonia or a waking night terror. But when Johnson’s Kerr gets high, his eyes remain focused. He fears the impending withdrawal even when he is battling narcotic unconsciousness. He speaks gently as he begs those around him to let him sit in this dysregulated bliss until he dies. This is why he does everything that he does, from the protein shake he makes in the morning to the way he pins an opponent to the ground.
This titanic performance is undermined by the surrounding film. Though Safdie has clearly nurtured and guided his lead, Johnson’s Kerr is one of many fascinating but unsupported strands in the text. There is the suggestion that emasculation is a type of performance. There is a potential contrast between domestic life as a fight with ever-changing rules, while the ring follows a kind of divine, preordained logic. There is the increasing sense that Kerr is helplessly drawn to physiological extremes in all its forms, that he is chasing not greatness, not a rush, but the externalization and expulsion of his own internal chaos. But as fully formed as these ideas sound on paper, nothing substantial winds up in the film.
Benny Safdie has been involved in some of the most electric, overstuffed American cinema of the past decade. Uncut Gems coursed with the same penchant for vice, but that film eventually blossomed into a nightmare about living within a diaspora in America. The manic sincerity that drove Daddy Longlegs is sorely missed. Heaven Knows What was less measured about opioid addiction but far more attentive to its protagonist’s spirit and its star’s choices. For the first time, a Safdie project feels uninspired.
While watching The Smashing Machine, a horrible realization dawned on me. In the way that the contemporary AARP crowd devours mid-budget British comedies and Gen X has been swallowed by reactionary genre programmers like 28 Years Later, the millennial aesthetic sensibility has become sublimated by films like this. They have stunt casting populating period-accurate liminal spaces. They have wacky diegetic needle drops and are filmed in some storied analog format to give them “texture.” They are transparently manipulative but maintain a level of grit that makes them look authentic. At least Safdie has not lost any of his savviness: The Smashing Machine’s distressingly unremarkable formula is executed with crystallized single-minded purpose.