‘The Smashing Machine’ Review: Benny Safdie Turns the Fight Film Inside Out

In a few brief documentary-style scenes that appear just before the end credits, Benny Safdie makes his storytelling strategy for The Smashing Machine crystal clear. His brutal fight drama may borrow a few conventions from the boxing or wrestling movie playbook, but deep down it’s shot and shaped like a kind of fake documentary — a cool, observational study, almost like espionage — into the life of Mark Kerr, the man whose nickname gives the film its title. It’s a story told from a distance, almost in whispers, watching Kerr’s life, work, contradictions, and struggles with the quiet curiosity of a witness rather than the involvement of a traditional narrator.

It’s a curious approach, but for much of the film, it works. At times, The Smashing Machine feels like an echo of Raging Bull, Rocky, or The Wrestler, with a central figure whose path looks, at first, like that of countless fighters before him: a promising career, a steady romance, and then, inevitably, the slow unraveling of both. But the differences gradually become clear. One is stylistic: the hushed, half-overheard conversations; the fights framed and narrated by sportscasters who, in a way, double as storytellers; and Safdie’s insistence on filming Dwayne Johnson almost entirely from behind, so that his massive back becomes a kind of screen within the screen — the true visual centerpiece of the movie.

The other key difference lies in the story itself. Kerr’s life doesn’t fit the melodramatic arc of most sports dramas. It’s a tale of decline, yes, but not a tragedy — more a film about defeat, about learning to lose, about realizing that failure is not the end but something to live with. That’s where Safdie’s chosen structure begins to falter, or at least strain: The Smashing Machine moves at a steady pulse, with no major dramatic peaks or emotional breakdowns. It’s clearly by design — the offbeat soundtrack of Nala Sinephro’s experimental jazz alongside songs by The Alan Parsons Project, The Cleaners from Venus, and Robert Lester Folsom underscores that — but the even rhythm can start to feel limiting.

Inspired also by a real documentary made about him, the film follows Mark Kerr, a pioneer of what would later become mainstream MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), at a time when the sport was still rough, marginal, and barely known in the U.S. Most of the fights we see take place in Brazil or Japan. Like Johnson himself, Kerr comes from a wrestling background. He’s a powerhouse who doesn’t know what losing means, a man who crushes everyone in his path and commands fear wherever he goes. Off the mat, though, he’s polite, clean-cut, almost shy — living in Phoenix with his girlfriend Dawn Staples (a striking Emily Blunt) and trying to keep his modest life in balance. Money is tight, but he gets by.

Without leaning too hard on visual tricks, Safdie lets us notice that Mark is increasingly reliant on painkillers and opioids just to keep functioning. Before long, the excesses catch up with him: physical decline, tension with Dawn, disappointing performances, the slow collapse of everything he’s built. His bond with fellow fighter Mark Coleman (played by real-life MMA athlete Ryan Bader) and his stubborn willpower become his only lifelines. The contradiction between Kerr’s reserved demeanor and his violent profession is never explained — mercifully, there are no flashbacks or psychological “origin stories” — leaving him a compelling, quietly haunting mystery.

In the second half, Safdie starts looping his structure — fight, relationship crisis, training, collapse, repeat — not as repetition, but as routine, the weary rhythm of a man caught in his own cycle. It’s here that the film wobbles a bit, less as a story than as an exercise: an attempt to reinvent the fight movie by stripping away its usual peaks without quite finding an equally powerful alternative. Still, it’s a bold, even admirable choice. Johnson, who also produced the film, might have envisioned an awards contender, but beyond his performance, there’s little here that screams “Oscar.” Instead, The Smashing Machine feels closer in spirit to indie dramas like Kitty Green’s The Assistant than to anything the Academy tends to notice.

In that sense, Benny Safdie hasn’t really abandoned the kind of filmmaking he once shared with his brother Josh — from Daddy Longlegs to Uncut Gems. Ironically, The Smashing Machine is quieter and less frantic than those films, but it’s no leap into the Hollywood mainstream either. It’s a modest, oddly fascinating character study — sometimes hypnotic, sometimes elusive — that feels, above all, like a tribute to the pioneers of a physically punishing sport. It captures a few years in the life of a human tank realizing, painfully but truthfully, that in the ring as in life, sometimes you just have to learn how to lose.