Benny Safdie delivers a knock-out with Dwayne Johnson starring as UFC pioneer Mark Kerr.
Before his prize fight in Tokyo against Igor Vovchanchyn, a Japanese journalist puts a question to so-far undefeated UFC fighter Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson): “We as humans sometimes lose. What do you think that might feel like?” Kerr looks at him askance, brown slightly furrowed as he struggles to comprehend the question. Finally, he replies, almost apologetically, “I don't even known how to respond to that because I’ve never lost.” It’s the cusp of the new millennium and UFC – a brutal bloodsport invented to bring together boxers, wrestlers and martial artists in an (almost) no-holds-barred beat-down – has just started taking off in the USA and Japan. Mark Kerr, a former wrestler and one of the sport’s earliest adopters, has made a startling impression after his 1997 debut in São Paulo. He’s about to find out what losing feels like.
It was Dwayne Johnson who brought Mark Kerr’s story to Benny Safdie back in 2019, presumably after seeing the work the Safdie brothers had done with Robert Pattinson and Adam Sandler. Their star was on the rise; six years later, the brothers have gone their separate filmmaking ways for the time being, but step into the ring this autumn with films that will inevitably be compared. The Smashing Machine is the younger Safdie’s first solo feature outing as a writer/director, sticking with the sporting world of Lenny Cooke and Uncut Gems but shrugging off some of the cynicism that has made the Safdies such prominent members of the downtown New York filmmaking set.
Despite the odds, this snapshot of a man who helped to pioneer the modern form of kicking the ever-loving shit out of other men and having the ever-loving shit kicked out of him, is remarkably tender while avoiding the overwrought sentimentality that has made sporting dramas so popular in American film history. The brutality of a sport where strikingly few moves are off the table is contrasted against a domestic softness with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), who likes to cuddle up on the couch with Mark and their adorable cat, Sneakers, and worries endlessly about his self-destructive impulses while remaining glaringly defensive about her own.
Their relationship isn't perfect, but it’s also not utterly poisonous – there’s a realism to their bickering which is often comedic but occasionally horrifying, and this tension seeps into an audience perhaps expecting a man like Mark to lash out physically at his wife. While there are dramatic moments between the two volatile personalities, perhaps the most memorable fight they have is over the fact Dawn hasn’t remembered to trim their cactus. “I wanted this to look like the Road Runner cartoon,” Mark huffs snippily as he gestures at the plant. The delicate balance between the absurd and upsetting is all too familiar in Safdie’s work; it’s utilised here to charming effect, and Blunt and Johnson – formerly co-stars in Jungle Cruise – have an easy chemistry. Blunt’s also afforded a little more agency as the firecracker Dawn – okay, it’s another ‘long-suffering girlfriend/wife to a complicated man’ role she can add to her CV, but Dawn is sparky and self-determined, and even in a film largely dedicated to Johnson’s impressive performance, she doesn't disappear into the background.
Of course there have been inevitable (and not entirely unfair) jokes about The Rock running for an Oscar since The Smashing Machine was announced, but Safdie and Johnson certainly make a compelling case for it. While even a wig and some prosthetics can't hide his incredibly recognisable visage, there’s a delicateness and vulnerability Johnson brings to the role as well as obvious physical command that combine into a mesmerising and empathetic character study. He understands Kerr – undoubtedly because he was a part of the wrestling world long before he was an actor – and watching how deftly he delivers this performance, it’s a shame Johnson has languished in middling blockbusters and action movies for the last 20 years when he’s clearly capable of more.
But even beyond the two excellent lead performances and the exceptional supporting turn from real-life MMA fighter Ryan Bader as Kerr's friend and fellow UFC competitor, Mark Coleman, there's plenty else working in The Smashing Machine’s favour, which shuns the trappings of traditional sporting biopics obsessed with the concept of sacrificing everything in the name of victory. The early loss that Mark experiences sets his life on a different path: he must reckon with his opioid dependency; his self-destructive career; his relationship and his mental state before he can even think about getting back in the ring.
Safdie works in a different mode to the swollen melodrama of many genre mates – even the greatest among them – and a key influence is John Hyams' raw and revealing 1997 documentary, which also gives this film its name. Some moments are recreated, such as Kerr earnestly explaining UFC to a lightly baffled woman in a doctor's waiting room, but much has been condensed, and this is to the film's benefit as it avoids becoming a by-the-book account of Kerr's life so far.
Even the decision to shoot all the UFC fights in a more traditional television event style (distant angles, quick cuts, cameras buzzing around like flies) rather than the evocative and intimate close-ups that have defined masterworks like Raging Bull and even The Wrestler give The Smashing Machine its own signature. The handheld camerawork of previous Safdie films returns, with The Curse cinematographer Maceo Bishop (who also worked in the Uncut Gems camera department) stepping up to the plate, fashioning something that feels chaotic and thrilling but never out of control.
In fact, it's a film that feels gloriously alive, earnest in its depiction of masculinity that is fragile rather than toxic while still grappling with the question of why anyone would choose to make a living in such a barbaric way. Every punch, every kick and every fall is felt, and while he's mopping blood from his nose or having his chin stitched back up, the question lingers about the compulsion that drives Kerr; the compulsion that drives all of us to do things that are bad for us in the name of something greater that we might not even be able to articulate. In this sense, The Smashing Machine isn't about victory or loss, but the why and how you bleed.
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