The Smashing Machine (2025) Review

Maybe one of my most anticipated movies of the year, Benny Safdie’s latest, a biopic of MMA pioneer Mark Kerr, has finally hit theaters. Along with being a huge fan of the sport, I had very high expectations after seeing Safdie’s work on the show, The Curse. This felt like a perfect vehicle for the raw sensibilities of his aesthetic; after all, the sport’s biggest league carries the motto ‘as real as it gets.’ The subject matter also lends itself to themes that Safdie has handled quite deftly in other projects: class, human connection and deeply flawed main characters. Sadly, I don’t think the film ever escapes the trappings of its shallow genre, and while it certainly has a lot to offer visually the story falls flat for several other reasons.

              The look of this film is not one of those reasons. This is one of the best shot movies this year, and I think a big part of that is the director’s willingness to dirty an image. Handheld shakiness, framing characters through mirrors and windows, hard sources of light all add a deep sense of realism. Maybe it’s because this movie is based on a similarly-titled documentary about Kerr’s life, but there’s been a lot of talk about authenticity in this film. The Rock has mentioned how he really got punched in the face for the fight sequences thanks to Safdie’s unwillingness to cut in these moments, and I have to say it really paid off. These are some of the most realistic fight scenes I’ve ever seen on film, and they’re shot beautifully! Cinematographer Maceo Bishop cuts between VHS, 16mm and 65mm film, and I think each of those formats offers something very special to the visual language, mirroring the enormity of the emotions in certain moments and helping bring the story to life in a very textured way. But even the best cinematographers can’t make up for a faulty script.

              There are many complaints I have about the writing, but to me the most obvious place to start would be the dialogue—or maybe it’s the editing I should be blaming. Regardless of what’s at fault, conversations are cut in a way that makes it clear there was much more to the scene, leaving audiences with a strange feeling that the moment was abruptly ended, and that missing context perhaps explains why I often struggled to believe these characters would respond the way they did in certain situations. The reason I say the editing might be to blame is because the film as a whole has this same problem. Any time Kerr is about to experience something that could tell us more about him on a human level than the aforementioned sports documentary, we instantly cut to another scene, or sometimes even another character. Kerr goes to rehab, but we only see him enter and exit the gates. We assume he’s training for these fights, but we never see him actively working in a gym. Jumping around in space and time also prevents us from getting any sense of his preparation process for the sport that means so much to him. This highlights how even his connection to the sport of MMA remains half-baked.

              The movie starts with Kerr telling us how much winning means to him, so much that he’s willing to put his opponents through whatever pain he can inflict; but we never get anything to help us understand why that is. I don’t think Kerr had to have a big cliché revelation about fighting providing the validation he never otherwise received, but I think helping us understand why someone would sacrifice so much for so little pay would help humanize the titular subject, which was sorely needed. Safdie does the impossible with this movie by making a real-life person seem like a cardboard cutout. Sure, the film gestures toward substance abuse issues and Kerr’s unhappiness with his pay, but these themes are never developed in a way that illuminates something universally human about the subject. For most of the runtime he comes off as a very nice guy with the world stacked against him, which leads me to wonder how much say Kerr had in the screenwriting process for a movie based on his life. He always appears as the good guy, which is potentially problematic when you consider how his troubled marriage is portrayed in the film. The gender politics of this movie are pretty interesting; I feel like his now ex-wife is depicted as being irrational, dare I say hysterical, and that not only feeds into a lot of negative stereotypes, but it also calls to mind many questions of ethics in filmmaking when real subjects are concerned.

            In the edit, Safdie is too willing to cut away from the protagonist, constantly following his training partners and subplots in a way that prevents us from learning anything substantial about any character, ultimately deflating the emotional stakes of what should be a very intense friend vs friend semi-final bout. The story touches upon interesting topics but doesn’t investigate them, and in the end we’re left with a movie that looks amazing, but has a story that just feels unfinished. As far as the acting is concerned, I was impressed by real-life fighters Ryan Bader and Oleksandr Usyk, but they were really just playing themselves, so I wonder how hard that actually was. Johnson is fine as Kerr, and certainly gives the best performance of his career thus far, but that’s such a low bar. I continue to feel bad for Emily Blunt. She’s such a great actress, but between this and Nolan’s Oppenheimer she just can’t seem to get away from these emptily-written stereotypes about troubled women. The Smashing Machine is in theaters now, and while it’s certainly worth watch, I don’t know if I can recommend you pay theater prices to see it. Wait until it's streaming and, if you want to know about Mark Kerr, the real Smashing Machine, watch the documentary instead.