By Jason Osiason

The Smashing Machine is the anti Rocky. Benny Safdie tears apart the idea of triumph in a sports movie and replaces it with something raw, sad, and painfully human. It’s not about victory or redemption. It’s about ego, addiction, and self destruction. Dwayne Johnson plays Mark Kerr, a former MMA champion so lost inside his own myth that he keeps performing greatness long after it’s gone. There’s no story in the traditional sense. Just a man circling his own downfall, trying to convince himself he’s still in control. It starts broken and ends broken.

Safdie shoots it in close quarters with a handheld camera that never gives you room to breathe. The film drifts between fights, drug binges, and domestic explosions with a rhythm that feels intentionally off. It’s all repetition and exhaustion. The cycle never stops, which makes the film feel anti climatic in the best way. There’s no big moment, no last round, no redemption arc. Just a man trying to stay upright as his life caves in.

Johnson gives a performance that is strange, fragile, and magnetic. He plays Kerr as a man hiding behind forced smiles and old glory, someone who weaponizes his physicality to mask how hollow he’s become. It’s unsettling because it feels so close to his public image. You can feel him deconstructing himself, daring you to laugh, then punishing you for it. The performance is so weirdly self aware that the movie almost becomes a satire of the “Oscar transformation” itself.

Emily Blunt plays Dawn, the woman who sees straight through him. Their relationship is one long argument, looping between dependence and resentment. There’s a brutal scene where he throws her out of the house, and half the audience cheered. It felt like Safdie was holding up a mirror to expose how easily people still side with the loudest person in the room. Both characters are awful, but he’s the worse one — consumed by ego and desperate to be admired for pain he caused himself.

The movie feels half measured, and that’s what makes it so frustrating and fascinating. It flirts with three identities — an ultra weird anti Rocky meltdown about an insecure addict, a prestige biopic that keeps undercutting itself, and a self deprecating character piece on The Rock’s persona — but it never chooses. You keep waiting for it to dig beneath the mania, to show you what it really feels like to live inside that spiral, but it keeps pulling back. It’s like the film is scared of its own honesty.

Still, there’s something electric about it. Safdie directs like he’s daring The Rock to lose control, and sometimes he does. There are flashes of something raw and ugly that feel completely real. You can sense Safdie poking fun at the idea of this being The Rock’s “serious turn” while also letting him expose a piece of himself we’ve never seen. The movie has a handheld, almost documentary feel that makes every scene sting. It’s slow, intimate, and uncomfortable to watch, but alive in a way most biopics aren’t.

The Smashing Machine isn’t about redemption. It’s about a man who thinks he’s still winning long after everyone else has stopped watching. It’s a study of arrogance, pain, and delusion, told with a mix of sincerity and cruelty that only Benny Safdie could pull off. It’s messy, anti climactic, sometimes infuriating, and completely intentional. The kind of movie that keeps you thinking about why it made you squirm. [B]