The Smashing Machine
Directed by Benny Safdie
★★½
Judy Greer and Marc Menchaca in Dead of Winter. Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment.
Benny Safdie’s solo directing debut is a choice, not a gimmick. The Smashing Machine leans fully into a 90s camcorder, vérité vibe—blown-out whites, rolling shutter, clipped dialogue, the occasional warble in the tape. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a design principle. The film looks and sounds like the decade it’s interrogating, and that technical conviction is its sharpest edge.
As Mark Kerr, Dwayne Johnson dials everything down to a whisper. He’s warm, guarded, almost painfully gentle—an inversion of the invincible screen persona he’s built for years. The performance works because he resists the easy beats: no chest-thumping speeches, no prefab “one last fight” catharsis. Johnson gives us a guy who can rag-doll another human yet can’t always form a complete sentence about what he actually wants. It’s patient, humane work.
Emily Blunt is just as good as Dawn Staples, playing the partner who understands the cost of the chase better than the chaser. Blunt does a lot in the negative space—tight half-smiles, a hand hovering on a shoulder that doesn’t quite land. The two have real chemistry, the kind built in glances and practical negotiations, not monologues. And yet the film (and the script) keeps them at arm’s length. We’re invited to observe, not truly enter, and that distance is a feature until it becomes a bug.
Safdie and his team absolutely cook on craft. The texture of the image has purpose: the grain becomes a mask; the dropouts feel like memory failing mid-thought. Fight sequences are staged less like climaxes and more like evidence—wide frames, ugly overhead fluorescents, the thud and suck of bodies microphoned like a bad high-school gym. The score is stellar: spare, modern, and a little haunted—sustained tones that bleed into the diegetic hiss so you’re never sure where composition stops and environment starts.
As an alt-sports biopic, the movie’s best instinct is dodging cliché. No extensive training montage, no crowd-pleasing moral. The film keeps circling a richer idea: Kerr’s hypermasculine search for meaning through brute strength—the high of winning, the emptiness that follows, the pseudo-power in domination that evaporates the second the bell rings. When The Smashing Machine locks onto that theme, it hums.
But the structure is slack. Scenes accumulate more than they progress. The documentary posture—observational, hands-off—protects the film from melodrama, but it also lets big moments pass without consequence. We glimpse extraordinary material (Kerr measuring himself against a version of manhood that keeps moving the goalposts; Dawn quietly adding up what’s left of them after each fight) and then cut away before the film commits to the dig. The restraint feels principled until it reads as evasive.
So, yes: mixed bag. Impeccable technical execution; two strong leads operating in a subdued, lived-in register; a thematic vein that could have carried the whole runtime if mined consistently. What’s missing is a spine—a shape to hold the insight in place. Even so, Safdie’s debut sticks. It’s the rare sports film that refuses to confuse motion with momentum, and it leaves you hearing the ring’s echo long after the tape chews to blue.
