‘THE SMASHING MACHINE’ is a Shockingly Flat Affair

A smorgasbord of tired biopic tropes piped into one impressively dull sports drama, The Smashing Machine follows a UFC pioneer battling opioid addiction and a toxic relationship while clawing his way to the top of the sport. The problem is, even for a world-class grappler, there’s simply nothing here to hold onto. The characters are flat, the chemistry shallow, the performances serviceable+ at best, and the whole production feels strangely low energy, especially considering the production comes from Benny Safdie, the man (partially) responsible for two of the most electric films of the 2010’s in Good Time and Uncut Gems.

Dwayne (“Don’t Call Him The Rock Anymore”) Johnson stars as Mark Kerr, one of the UFC’s earliest fighters, making his debut in a 1997 melee in Brazil before moving on to a series of international Pride bouts in Japan. Mark is a hulking bull of a man, all sinew and smiles cloaking some deeper internal struggles that the film never really figures out how to illustrate. Between matches, Kerr remains a question mark the film never answers. We see him abusing opioids, gaming doctors for prescriptions, soaking up fan adoration, and oscillating between tenderness and rage for his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt). The movie gestures toward interiority it never delivers. Johnson is better than he’s been in a film before, physically committed, underneath facial prostethics, even crying on screen for what feels like the first time, but I’m not sure I understand the early awards buzz that’s circled his turn here. His performance flairs up into something truly good every now but then it just becomes, like Sadie’s movie and script, rather flat. It’s good, not great and to say otherwise is to grade on a pretty steep curve.

Kerr is the centerpiece, but also a raging narcissist with little complexity. He’s great at beating people up, less great at losing, and his oversized ego flattens any nuance. His friendship with fellow fighter Mark Coleman (real life MMA fighter Ryan Bader) should be a crucial piece of unlocking the puzzle of Kerr and his towering machomiso, but it never clicks into gear. Not on the page, not in the performances. It’s just another missed opportunity that relies on stereotypes rather than leaning into specificity.

At one point Mark’s girlfriend Dawn, who gets the second most screen time in the movie, snaps at him, “You don’t even know anything about me!” It’s a line that may as well be aimed directly at the audience as, no, we do not really know anything about this Bechdel-failing girlfriend character. And that’s true of pretty much every one. The script, also from Sadie, weirdly doesn’t seem to know what it should highlight in any given moment so it lurches from pit stop to pit stop: addiction spirals, relationship meltdowns, rinse, repeat. My audience sat in dead silence. No gasps, no cheers, no emotional spikes. Which is rather strange for a sports biopic, a genre built specifically to swoon audiences into emotional peaks. You could argue Safdie is aiming for an anti-sports biopic, but the reliance on clichés and lifeless characters says otherwise.

In many ways, the film is the opposite of UFC itself. The sport thrives on mixing disciplines into something eclectic and alive, whereas The Smashing Machine just recycles tired sports-drama tropes in the most static way possible. Even the UFC fights lack kineticism. The camera stays jammed tight in Mark and his opponents’ faces, maybe hoping to suggest inner struggle, but instead sapping momentum and failing to deliver any kind of adrenaline. The only thing landing are the sound effects, which crunch loudly to fill in for the emptiness all around it.

The Smashing Machine marks Benny Safdie’s first solo feature, after years of co-writing and co-directing with his brother Josh. Their collaborations were live wires, every moment jittering with unpredictability and verve. Good Time and Uncut Gems are two of the most electrifying films of the 2010s, both pulling out career-best performances from their lead actors and promising the rise of director’s with an inimitable sense of propulsion. Even Benny’s smaller screen work with Nathan Fielder (The Curse) showed him experimenting with form in ways that felt alien and wholly promising. The Smashing Machine, though, suggests he might not only benefit from a creative partner but actually need one. Alone, his work is startlingly inert.

His creation here is less starmaker than starfish – it just lies there, limp and inert, waiting for it all to be over. Safdie clearly has affection for Kerr and for UFC, but none of that translates to the screen. Even the closing credits, with real footage of Kerr, feel oddly lifeless and screwy. By the end, I was left wondering why this movie even exists at all.

The Safdie brothers’ films grabbed you by the throat and made you pay attention. Here, you’re more likely to check your phone, since the entire movie plays out exactly as expected by the end of act one. There’s no surprise, no suspense, no dynamism. Watching this film is like being trapped in a toxic relationship where the same fight happens again and again. It doesn’t speak the language of cinema, and you don’t need cauliflower ears to recognize the dead silence.

CONCLUSION: ‘The Smashing Machine’ is a shockingly flat UFC fighter biopic from writer-director Benny Sadie that seems incapable of understanding what makes a movie interesting. Dwayne Johnson is Rock solid in the lead role but the character remains a bit of a mystifying lunk, always at arm’s reach and never very appealing.