The Smashing Machine: Benny Safdie’s Film Reviewed
The Smashing Machine takes home the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice 82. With a powerful and intimate gaze, Benny Safdie immerses the audience in the shoes of antihero Mark Kerr, the freestyle wrestling champion who became a legend.
More than a sports film, The Smashing Machine is a journey into the broken soul of a man who made fighting his life, both inside and outside the ring. With uncompromising and intense direction, Benny Safdie turns Mark Kerr’s story into a parable of falls and rebirths, where fragility and glory intertwine to create legend. A film that hits at the heart, because it’s not about invincibility, it’s about the vulnerability that makes even the seemingly indestructible human. Here’s our full review.
The Smashing Machine, Synopsis
The Smashing Machine follows the life of Mark Kerr, a champion in freestyle wrestling and MMA, trapped between glory and self-destruction. Through grueling training, brutal fights in the ring, and the invisible scars of addiction, the film sketches a man balanced between strength and fragility, victory and vulnerability. This isn’t just a story about an athlete, it’s the story of a man fighting to survive himself.
The Smashing Machine, The Review
You walk in expecting another polished American sports biopic. Benny Safdie immediately proves otherwise. With his retro-pop sensibility, he tells the story of Mark Kerr the “human beast,” or more accurately, the destructive machine, an MMA pioneer and international ring champion. Kerr’s life reflects a slice of 1990s American pop culture: a world of loose rules, excess, instability, and insecurity.
Kerr is the man behind the machine: capable of wreaking havoc and self-destruction, yet disciplined enough never to break the rules, at least in the ring.
Safdie takes the boldest route: he doesn’t build a monument; he dives into Kerr’s psyche. The result is a portrait full of contrasts, tender yet rigid, vulnerable yet strong. Kerr hovers between myth and modernity: a gladiator seemingly carrying the weight of his era, yet suffocated by it, chained to pain, expectation, and inner fragility.
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson takes on The Smashing Machine
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson rises to the challenge, shedding his Hollywood macho persona to play an antihero. Every punch, every labored breath carries weight, physically and emotionally. Johnson captures the impossibility of numbing pain, the struggle to accept defeat, and the difficulty of sharing his inner life. In a rising, dizzying arc, Kerr moves through life as he does the ring – confused, staggering, gradually sinking into emotional vertigo. You feel it in each step, hear it in every labored breath.
Safdie fully immerses the audience in Kerr’s perspective, placing the weight of his pain squarely on our shoulders.
The Smashing Machine, Dwayne Johnson e Emily Blunt
Emily Blunt’s Performance
Emily Blunt, as Dawn Staples, adds depth and nuance. She shares the fight with Kerr, yet never truly chose it. A perfect counterpoint, she is strong when necessary, fragile in moments of recovery. Through her eyes, Kerr’s decadent soul is reflected—until she too becomes trapped in the same vortex, both victim and, at times, executioner.
The roar of punches collides with quiet domestic moments, and here the film’s true power emerges: the violence of the ring mirrors the subtle yet equally devastating violence of everyday life.
Safdie rejects all sports-movie clichés. No triumphant montages, no illusions of epic victories. The fights become moments of alienation, the camera lingering on labored breaths and pauses rather than glorifying the hero. It is in this overlap -ring and life- that the film’s strength is revealed: survival, not triumph, is the real fight.
When the body begins to fail, the story reaches its epilogue: the grueling climb back, the realization that a man becomes legendary only by being fallible. Free from the prison of victory, he stands triumphant despite his flaws and the scars he carries from every blow. A kind of Rocky Balboa 2.0, Kerr’s final smile is not just a gesture, it’s liberation, a moment of lightness against the grim seriousness of Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), fresh from the greatest triumph of his career.
It is precisely in vulnerability that the film breathes most authentically. Kerr is a hero not because he wins, but because he falls, rises, and bears the marks of every defeat. His legend is born not from invincibility, but from exposed fragility, the capacity to endure pain and accept that a man, before being an athlete, is made of cracks. And it is through those cracks that light passes, making the legend immortal.
The Smashing Machine, The Cast
Dwayne Johnson: Mark Kerr Emily Blunt: Dawn Staples Ryan Bader: Mark Coleman Bas Rutten: sé stesso Oleksandr Usyk: Ihor Vovčančyn Lyndsey Gavin: Elizabeth Coleman Satoshi Ishii: Enson Inoue James Moontasri: Akira Shoji Yoko Hamamura: Kazuyuki Fujita
The Smashing Machine, Trailer
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