Film Review: The Smashing Machine 重擊人生 (2025) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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“The Smashing Machine” is not the film you expect. Benny Safdie, stepping out from his brother’s shadow for his solo directorial debut, has taken the most recognizable action star on the planet and placed him inside a damp, gray prison of his own making. This is a film about a fighter who cannot fight his own pain. It’s a character study of staggering physical presence and profound interior emptiness. It is also, frustratingly, a film that seems to admire its own bleakness a little too much, mistaking relentless grit for depth.
The film chronicles the peak and plummet of Mark Kerr, the real-life UFC heavyweight champion, between 1997 and 2000. This is not a triumphant sports saga. The “Smashing Machine” is a nickname that becomes bitterly ironic. Kerr (played by Dwayne Johnson) is a genetic marvel, a mountain of muscle whose body is a weapon. Yet the real battle is waged not in the octagon, but in the claustrophobic hotel rooms, airport terminals, and dimly lit bathrooms where he injects opioids to numb the unrelenting ache of being Mark Kerr.
Here lies the film’s single, magnificent revelation: Dwayne Johnson. Stripped of the charismatic smirk, the raised eyebrow, the invincible swagger, Johnson disappears. The performance is a feat of both physical transformation—with prosthetics that add a weary, bulldog thickness to his face—and spiritual excavation. His Kerr speaks in a low, hesitant rumble. His eyes hold a wounded, almost childlike confusion. How did he get here? Why does hurting people hurt so much? Johnson lets us see the engine sputtering inside the tank. It is, without question, the most vulnerable and fully realized work of his career. He is matched by Emily Blunt as Dawn Staples, his wife. Blunt wisely avoids creating a saint or a villain. Dawn is frayed, desperate, and often cruel, her love curdled into a co-dependent toxicity. Their scenes together are masterclasses in uncomfortable realism; you don’t watch their arguments, you endure them.
Safdie directs with the same restless, anxious energy that defined Uncut Gems, but he turns the volume down on the chaos and up on the dread. The camera, often handheld, lingers in close-up on the stubble on a jaw, the sweat on a neck, the needle breaking skin. The fight scenes themselves are not exhilarating. They are horrifying, visceral affairs. Safdie often mutes the diegetic sound, overlaying the brutality with a haunting, discordant jazz score by Nala Sinephro. It creates a dissociative effect, as if we, like Kerr, are watching the violence from behind a painkiller haze. It’s technically brilliant.
And yet, for all its formal bravery and phenomenal acting, “The Smashing Machine” left me feeling curiously hollow. The film chooses a narrow, repetitive three-year spiral as its subject, and it commits to that monotony with unwavering discipline. We see the cycle: the pain, the shot, the fight, the argument, the pain. While true to the nature of addiction, it makes for a narrative that feels curiously flat. The film has a one-note quality. It resists any arc that might provide catharsis or even deeper insight, preferring to stew in its own misery. It mistakes showing the grind for illuminating it.
The great sports tragedies—a “Raging Bull”, a “Wrestler”—use their bleakness to ask profound questions about identity, masculinity, and the American appetite for destruction. “The Smashing Machine” shows us the destruction in intimate, unsparing detail, but seems less interested in what it means. It’s a beautifully crafted, superbly acted mood piece that, in its dedication to avoiding all sports-movie clichés, forgets to give us a reason to care beyond bearing witness to the pain.
This is a landmark performance trapped in a very good, but not great, film. You will not forget Dwayne Johnson’s Mark Kerr. You may wish the film around him gave his agony a sharper point. (Neo, 2026)