YNOT at the Movies

Bone-crunching, brutally physical, and at times so intense you have to look away, write-director Benny Safdie's "The Smashing Machine" (USA 2025 | 123 min.) is far more than just another sports biopic. It's a raw, deeply human examination of violence, obsession, and the cost of glory. Told with uncompromising honesty and elevated by a transformative performance from Dwayne Johnson, the film charts the rise and fall of one of mixed martial arts' earliest legends while forcing viewers to confront their own fascination with combat. It's not merely about the spectacle of men fighting; it's also about the inner battles, the wounds we can't see, and the restless questions that drive them into the ring in the first place.

At the center of this story is Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson), a pioneering mixed martial arts fighter whose raw strength and relentlessness will make him a dominant force inside the ring. Outside of it, he wrestles with battles no less punishing: a dependence on painkillers that spirals out of control, the psychological toll of a career built on violence, and a volatile relationship with Dawn Staples-Kerr (Emily Blunt) that mirrors the physical clashes in competition. As his fame rises and his body takes blow after blow, Kerr's personal life begins to crumble, revealing the human cost of becoming "the smashing machine" that fans come to see.

Director Benny Safdie tells Kerr's story without softening its edges. The fights are staged with documentary immediacy—sweaty, bruising, and punishingly real—and Dwayne Johnson's total physical and emotional transformation gives the film a startling sense of authenticity. Yet beyond the battered bodies and split lips, the story is also interested in the souls of its characters. It doesn't give viewers a neat answer to why men like Kerr fight, whether it's for the thrill, the high, the pride, or the ego, but it makes clear that the drive comes from somewhere deeper than money or fame.

And while the film never explicitly asks why audiences are drawn to such brutality, it's impossible to leave without that question gnawing at you. Are we simply the modern equivalent of the Roman mob, cheering from the sidelines as men destroy each other for our entertainment? Benny Safdie doesn't moralize or judge, but by confronting the sport in all its unforgiving intensity, he leaves us to wrestle with the unsettling answer ourselves.

Visceral, searching, and emotionally devastating, "The Smashing Machine" is more than a chronicle of Mark Kerr's life. It's a fearless exploration of the human appetite for violence, and the unseen battles that rage long after the final bell.

"The Smashing Machine" opens in theaters on Friday, October 3, 2025.