Smashing Machine: Benny Safdie convinces in solo (review)
Dwayne Johnson plays MMA champion Mark Kerr in a biopic that balances the violence of the fights with the hyper affectionate gaze given to its hero.
One of the keys to Smashing Machine perhaps lies in its use of a cover of My Way by Elvis Presley. The piece illustrates a sequence montage showing the training of the film’s hero, Mark Kerr, a pioneer of free-fighting in the 90s. My Way, a song which takes stock of a life, is the ideal musical support for a biopic, recounting in this case the ups and downs of an athlete, the heights of the podiums as well as the depths of stays in rehab. But the Elvis who sings My Way is the Elvis of the end: pathetic and brilliant at the same time, tired but nevertheless superb.
Smashing Machine plays a lot on this kind of dichotomy. Director Benny Safdie has a rather classic approach to the biopic, right down to the “Oscar-worthy” performance of star Dwayne Johnson, but regularly hacks it with poetic stalls, seeking the sublime in material that could have been nothing but trash, or kitsch. The filmmaker is as much a scion of Cassavetes and Raging Bull as he is of reality TV The Osbournes.
He films his hero as a bigger-than-life figure as well as as an anonymous person that one might encounter in the supermarket, a brawler who will deliver his best fight not in a ring but during a Homeric domestic scene punctuated by Jungleland – another musical key to the film, by a singer, Bruce Springsteen, mixing like Kerr power and ultra-sensitivity, and knowing how to transform stories of ordinary destinies into epics. This is what Safdie is also aiming for here, with a little clumsiness but a heart like that.
By Benny Safdie. With Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Lyndsey Gavin… Duration 2h04. Released October 29, 2025
