The Smashing Machine Review: Dwayne Johnson Delivers Best Performance in Flawed Film

The Fighter Who Forgot How To Lose

The film begins where you’d expect, in the middle of a high-stakes fight. Kerr has just secured yet another win, and the crowd is roaring. But Safdie is less interested in the punches than in the silences that follow. We learn that Mark has been winning for so long that he has forgotten how to lose. Literally.

When a journalist casually asks him how he would react to defeat, he freezes. His expression flickers between confusion and fear, like a man trying to process a word he’s never heard before.

This one quiet exchange captures the core of the film. Mark Kerr isn’t just a champion, he’s a man whose identity depends on victory.

The idea of failure feels alien to him, and Johnson captures that panic beautifully, the way his eyes dart, the way his voice stalls as if searching for the right emotion. It’s one of the first hints that this performance isn’t just about muscle. It’s about the psychology underneath it.

Benny Safdie’s Controlled Chaos

Safdie, working solo without his brother Josh this time, brings a strange tenderness to the film’s chaos. Fans of Uncut Gems and Good Time might expect relentless energy and anxiety, but here Benny channels that same intensity into quieter, more emotional beats.

The pacing is deliberate, almost meditative at times, maybe too much for some viewers, but there’s a reason. Safdie lets us live inside Mark’s headspace, where time stretches between fights and every moment of stillness feels like a countdown to relapse.

The camera lingers on bruises, pills, and half-empty hotel rooms. It doesn’t scream tragedy, it hums it. There’s a kind of empathy in Safdie’s gaze that keeps the story from feeling exploitative.

The MMA world looks raw and unpolished, like the sweat-stained aftermath of a dream that’s starting to rot.

Painkillers and the Price of Invincibility

Mark’s drug use is not shown as a shocking reveal. It seeps into the story naturally, the way pain seeps into a fighter’s body. He starts using steroids and painkillers not to enhance himself but to maintain himself, to keep the illusion of indestructibility alive.

Safdie doesn’t turn this into a moral sermon. He shows how easily the addiction merges with routine, how the line between self-preservation and self-destruction blurs until it disappears.

When doctors finally warn him to stop, the moment lands not as confrontation but as confusion. Who is Mark Kerr without the drugs? Without the next fight? Without the next win?

Dwayne Johnson plays this uncertainty with surprising vulnerability. For perhaps the first time in his career, he looks small on screen, not physically, but emotionally. You can see the exhaustion, the yearning to just feel normal again.

Emily Blunt’s Dawn The Fire and the Fallout

Enter Emily Blunt as Dawn Staples, Mark’s girlfriend and later wife, whose relationship with him becomes the emotional nucleus of the film. It’s fascinating how Safdie shifts focus from the ring to the home, from the roar of crowds to the quiet implosions of a couple falling apart. Dawn and Mark’s love story begins in warmth but slowly melts into toxicity.

Blunt is spectacular. She brings charm, frustration, and deep sadness to Dawn. There are moments when you can’t stand her, when her emotional outbursts feel manipulative, but that’s the point. She isn’t written as a movie wife who stands by her man no matter what. She’s flawed, human, and maddeningly real. In a strange way, she becomes the film’s mirror. Her fights with Mark are staged with the same choreography as his MMA battles, intense, painful, and deeply personal.

It’s here that The Smashing Machine morphs from a sports drama into a Marriage Story set in a fighter’s world. The sequences between Blunt and Johnson crackle with energy. You can almost feel their real-life friendship bleeding through, turning the arguments into something raw and believable. These scenes hit harder than any punch in the ring.

The Pacing Problem

For all its emotional depth, the film isn’t without flaws. The pacing is uneven, especially in the second act. Safdie occasionally gets so absorbed in mood that momentum starts to slip away. The film runs just under two hours, but at times, it feels longer, not because it’s dull, but because it drifts.

The screenplay wanders between moments of genius and patches of repetition, as if unsure whether it wants to be a sports saga or a domestic drama.

There’s also a sense that the biopic format holds it back slightly. Mark Kerr’s story, fascinating as it is, doesn’t have the wild unpredictability of someone like Jake LaMotta or Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson. It’s more subdued, more internal, and while Safdie finds honesty in that stillness, it may not satisfy viewers expecting the adrenaline rush of Warrior or The Wrestler.

Still, even in its meandering moments, the film remains gripping because of its performances. Johnson and Blunt are magnetic enough to carry the quieter stretches.

Dwayne Johnson Finally Acts And It’s Glorious

Now let’s talk about The Rock.

This is, without question, the most complex and lived-in performance of Dwayne Johnson’s career. For years, audiences have admired his screen presence, his charm, his humor. But The Smashing Machine is the first time he disappears completely into a role.

The transformation is startling. From the prosthetics that give him a receding hairline and a bulkier frame to the emotional restraint in his eyes, everything about this performance feels real.

He doesn’t play Mark Kerr like a hero or a victim. He plays him as a man who doesn’t know how to exist outside the cage. Watch his body language when he’s not fighting, the slight fidgeting, the way his arms hang awkwardly as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. That’s acting, not posing. It’s the kind of work that invites serious award-season chatter, and for good reason.

And the emotional work? Stunning. When Mark tries to reconcile with Dawn or faces his demons in rehab, Johnson strips away every bit of his superstar image. He lets himself be pathetic, broken, and confused.

It’s the kind of performance that earns not applause but silence, the kind where you just sit there thinking, “Oh, so this is what he’s capable of.”

The Scene Stealer Ryan Bader

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes Ryan Bader as Mark Coleman, Kerr’s rival and friend. Bader, a real-life MMA fighter, makes his acting debut here, and it’s shockingly good. He brings a quiet steadiness to the role, a grounded energy that balances out Johnson’s storm. Their scenes together have an unspoken tension, the kind that only two fighters can share. It’s rare for a debut performance to feel this confident. Bader nails it.