Vague Visages’ The Smashing Machine review contains minor spoilers. Benny Safdie’s 2025 movie features Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt and Ryan Bader. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

For a filmmaker like Benny Safdie, known mostly as one-half of a former fraternal directing duo with brother Josh on many good-to-great features that all have a commonality of exhausting physicality and frenzy in their pace and structure, The Smashing Machine feels strangely lethargic and detached. The film’s softness feels reflective of the personality of its central subject, MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter Mark Kerr, who is a veritable gentle giant outside the ring. But that lethargy carries itself into the ring as well. Contrastingly, Kerr’s the kind of guy who aims to absolutely destroy his opponents’ flesh and bones while he’s fighting, even if afterward he’s more than cordial and inviting in a genuine friendly manner. Lead actor Dwayne Johnson sort of presents himself the same way — a very cordial guy with a warm smile, which is a total 180-degree from his wrestling persona, The Rock, who is brash, rude, egotistical and electrifying in his machismo. Johnson’s performance as Mark Kerr is similar to a lot of decent imitations of late that never quite transcend to being interesting or powerful as performances — Rami Malek as Freddy Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Netflix’s Maestro (2023) come to mind as comparable.

Johnson is The Show in The Smashing Machine, but he’s also perhaps the most to blame for the movie feeling dramatically and emotionally languid. The headliner’s acting chops have a hard ceiling at his ability to mimic Kerr’s reasoned voice and his mannerisms (particularly his smile). Johnson’s movements as a muscular guy come as second nature, having spent a long time as a professional wrestler, yet the arguments his character has with dolled-up, hanger-on girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt, who gives the film’s only immediately affecting performance) feel like rehearsal skits rather than dramatic conversations with real heft or tension. Where Johnson actually shines is in the wry comedy Safdie inserts into The Smashing Machine, particularly a scene where Kerr asks for stronger drugs from a Japanese medic who prescribes Advil after a fight.

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It’s rather disappointing that The Smashing Machine is essentially a beat-for-beat recreation of John Hyams’ remarkable 2002 HBO documentary of the same name. This is another factor contributing to the lack of drama within Safdie’s 2025 film. Hyams was able to conjure anticipation, fear and the blood and sweat of the ring because he filmed close, and had the camera linger on the intimacy of fighting. The documentarian also had the advantage of being with the real people going through the real motions and experiencing real pain. It’s hard to duplicate that in a film without heightening it in some way through dramatic enhancements. Will audiences who have never seen the documentary be able to look past this? Perhaps, but even if they see the documentary after The Smashing Machine, I think it will be clear how the fight sequences in Safdie’s recreation simply feel like footnotes. It’s immediately evident in the way they’re staged — with quick-cuts and ample distance and uninspired angles of the camera — that the anticipation, exhilaration and pain of the ring that Kerr talks about is never rendered visually the way it is in Hyams’ documentary. The punches don’t feel like an explosion in The Smashing Machine, but rather more of an indistinguishable motion that’s just part of a larger bout. Defeat feels like just another day instead of the end of the world, even as Johnson tries his damndest to imitate the act of experiencing a gutting loss on an illegal move by his opponent Igor Vovchanchyn (Oleksandr Usyk). 

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The biggest problem with The Smashing Machine is that Safdie simply doesn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of style or ideas. The single moment in the film that he conjures himself visually happens during one of the pivotal arguments that Kerr and Staples have in their home, which is only mentioned and recounted through interviews in the documentary. Even though Safdie had the perfect opportunity to force some kind of distinctive and memorable stamp on The Smashing Machine, the aforementioned moment plays with the same inconsequence as the rest of the movie, where the increased yelling, cursing and breaking of objects feels surface-level theatrical, and the heart of the scene comes across as removed, observational and plain. I don’t like to speculate over “which brother is more talented,” but Benny Safdie didn’t do any favors for himself by making a movie that feels like it’s pulling its punches the entire time.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is a writer/filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He has contributed to publications such as Bustle, Frameland and Film Inquiry. Soham is currently in production for his first short film. All of his film and writing work can be found at extrasensoryfilms.com.

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