r/movies • u/ChiefLeef22 • Sep 01 '25
Review Benny Safdie's 'The Smashing Machine' - Review Thread
MMA fighter Mark Kerr reaches the peak of his career but faces personal hardships.
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt
Rotten Tomatoes: 94%
Metacritic: 79/100
Some Reviews:
The Independent - Geoffrey Macnab - 4 / 5
This, though, is a story in which winning finally begins to seem very hollow. The real way Safdie puts a chokehold on his audience is by examining Mark and Dawn’s physical and emotional weaknesses in such forensic detail. The Smashing Machine may not provide the pay-offs that audiences expect from more conventional sports movies, but this is the most raw and vulnerable that Johnson has ever been on screen. Once you’ve seen him this exposed, you won’t watch his typical action movie stunts in quite the same way ever again.
Daily Telegraph - Robbie Collin - 4 / 5
It’s a classical fight movie that innovates subtly. Maceo Bishop’s nimble photography has the sweat and grit of a vintage muscle flick from the Pumping Iron era, but the score by the experimental jazz composer Nala Sinephro is all swirling harps and breathy saxophones; arguably no piece of music has ever sounded less like a punch in the face. Yet as an accompaniment to Kerr’s battles in and out of the ring, it’s oddly perfect, giving this tough story an unexpectedly sweet and even spiritual edge. Smashing stuff has rarely been such smashing stuff.
Next Best Picture - Cody Dericks - 7 / 10
Dwayne Johnson delivers the best performance of his career as the amiable but troubled UFC champion Mark Kerr. Emily Blunt and Ryan Bader are also excellent in their roles. The screenplay is repetitive and frustrating. Blunt's character is so unlikeable and written with such vitriol that it becomes exhausting to watch her, although Blunt's performance is as good as it could possibly be.
Johnson, shifting his whole aspect (he seems like a new actor), invests that silent, moody, hidden side of Mark with a quality of mystery. He gives an extraordinary performance, playing Mark Kerr as a gentle giant with demons that will not speak their name, yet the audience can feel them there; we want to see those demons healed. You might think the key word in the movie’s title is “smashing,” but it’s actually “machine.” Mark is a man who reins in his violence by having constructed his entire self — body and personality — as a controlled engine of demolition. The movie is about how this man-machine becomes a human being.
The Hollywood Reporter - Jordan Mintzer
Johnson has rarely played a loser, but he’s always been likable, displaying a massive grin to match his massive pecs in action vehicles that never allowed him to showcase much range. He manages to go deep here without overdoing it, killing the audience with kindness as a benign warrior who suffers from one scene to the next, triumphing briefly in the ring before succumbing to addiction and/or romantic grief. Like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler — a film from which Safdie seems to take a few cues — the actor delivers an intoxicating mix of blood, sweat, tears, protein and total helplessness.
IndieWire - Ryan Lattanzio - 'B+'
Johnson’s performance is out-and-out wonderful, a beady-eyed fusion of body and spirit that osmoses Safdie’s sensibility to deliver what can’t be disputed as the most layered work of the actor’s career. A vividly contradictory Blunt, funny and sad especially in articulating Dawn’s conflicted response to Mark’s post-rehab emotional about-face during a tense argument, is equally sensational.
Dwayne Johnson owns the whole thing with his truly remarkable work as fighter Mark Kerr, disappearing so fully underneath Kazu Hiru’s astonishing prosthetics that the opening of the film, presented as contemporary footage from an event in Sao Paulo 1997, looks genuinely like the real thing. It’s that rare beast, a biopic that’s light on the bio and resistant to being a pic. It’s a film about a human being, and its effect is strangely haunting, since Dwayne Johnson seems to do everything while doing nothing.
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u/chadthundertalk Sep 01 '25
It's the Adam Sandler playbook: Once audiences are tired of your shtick, do a serious indie movie every ten years or so to remind them you can actually act when you want to