The Smashing Machine: Benny Safdie’s Adrenaline-Fuelled Wrestling Biopic

Premiering at Venice Film Festival, Benny Safdie’s first solo movie – starring Dwayne Johnson as UFC fighter Mark Kerr – is a surprising departure from his previous work

“I’ve never lost a fight!” declares Mark Kerr, the UFC fighter portrayed by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, before losing his first fight, a moment that will define the rest of his career. For Benny Safdie’s first solo movie, The Smashing Machine, it makes sense that he has set his sights on someone not dissimilar from the sort of protagonist the Safdie brothers would have chosen together. Mark Kerr is a man not unlike obsessive gambler Howard (Adam Sandler) in Uncut Gems, or Robert Pattinson’s Connie in Good Time, a wanted criminal reluctant to reform. All of these men are adrenaline junkies always searching for their next high, whether that comes in a payout or a prescription bottle, but as many of those who are addicted to life’s extreme highs, they fall ever so hard. These are not life’s winners – but it is not success that Safdie is interested in.

Kerr, the wrestling legend that never was, missed the first UFC finals broadcast on American television by a few ill-timed blows to the head. He may have lost the chance for a championship and international fame, but he is far from a loser. If anything, as this sweaty sports drama shows, he learns more from his fights with addiction and explosive arguments with his girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt), than he does in the ring. 

It is in these fraught domestic scenes where Dwayne Johnson’s performance lets the side down. In appearance, the ex-wrestler turned actor is perfectly cast for this role, however he lacks physicality as soon as he exits the ring. While Blunt cries, screams, shouts and whimpers, she is stonewalled by her sparring partner, her performance caught somewhere between Johnson and a hard place. 

The Smashing Machine’s insistence on returning, round after round, to Dawn and Mark at loggerheads puts Kerr’s career on the back bench. Safdie prioritises Kerr’s rocky relationship, recreating cliches of the biographical drama with talented misunderstood men struggling with their respective partners. He forgets to explore the mixed martial arts fighting style Kerr pioneered, even as this is highlighted by a final title card. Likewise, Maceo Bishop’s grainy cinematography and handheld close shots, while perfect for Safdie’s show with Nathan Fielder, The Curse, feel disappointingly unremarkable in comparison to his work with his brother, Josh Safdie. 

The stony-faced performance from Johnson could be interpreted as a professional wrestler’s sense of control, but there is a disconnect between the rage that leads him to obliterate a door mid-row and the lack of emotion in Johnson’s face. In conversation with civilians – the older woman in the waiting room, shocked at his blackened eyes, or the doctor whom Kerr convinces to prescribe him opioids – Johnson shows a side to the fighter that is polite and even sweet. He has a sense of composure that someone of Johnson and Kerr’s sheer size adopts in order to tell the world he is not as threatening as he may seem. But given Johnson’s parallel career and matching heavyweight physique, this is not so much a character study of Mark Kerr as it is part of Johnson’s own personality. It is even more apparent that Johnson is offering more of himself than attempting to embody Kerr when we see the real Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine’s final scene, a man whose easy warmth immediately endears the audience to him.

Safdie’s debut solo feature may be drawn to the same murky worlds as he pursued with his brother, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, at least for Mark Kerr. Whether fatalistic cinema is a thing of Benny Safdie’s past in favour of more optimistic, albeit conventional dramas, it is too soon to tell. But in selecting a subject who fell just short of victory, Safdie lands fewer punches than his fighter.