It’s hard not to get invested in sports movies; whether they’re based on real events or entirely fictionalized, the formula of the genre is designed to suck you into the protagonists, building towards a cathartic crescendo. Even in the case of something like Rocky, it doesn’t even matter that he loses to Apollo Creed, as merely holding his own feels like a triumph. In that sense, I approached The Smashing Machine with some apprehension, knowing that it would likely embrace a variety of tropes from the genre, even with Benny Safdie at the helm. Interestingly, Safdie did manage to avoid the typical trappings of every other sports movie, though the result is a movie full of irritating protagonists on an uneventful journey.

In the late ’90s, Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) is a prominent figure in the world of MMA, a sport that’s still in its relative infancy. With the sport in its early days, Kerr is regularly flying across the country and across the world to participate in fights — his skills as a fighter and his impressive stature making him a force to be reckoned with. Not only does the athlete have to navigate the sacrifices he makes with his body, but also navigate his tense relationship with girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) and a burgeoning opioid addiction, a side effect of trying to treat the pain he puts his body through.

Safdie based his movie on the documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr, which was released in 2002, just a few years after the events of this biopic. Given how little people were aware of MMA and the UFC back then, it’s easy to see how people would be blown away by the brutality of the sport and the struggles Kerr suffered through. 20 years later, though, MMA has taken a prominent foothold in the zeitgeist, so while it’s still shocking to see just how brutal the sport can be, the concept alone doesn’t hit as hard in 2025 as it would have in 2002.

Smashing Machine focuses on three years of Kerr’s life: he already has a following, he already has his relationship with Dawn, and he’s already grappling with opioids. It feels like we’re thrown into this story in media res, which is one of the ways Safdie breaks the sports drama mold. The drawback, though, is that we’re not given much time to connect with Kerr, his journey to becoming an MMA fighter, or his relationship with Dawn. A key component of the entire movie is that Kerr isn’t necessarily an exceptional figure — he’s not the most charismatic or most charming person, and he’s also not outright flawed in any obvious way. We catch glimpses of the tension between him and Dawn, where it’s obvious that these people are wrong for each other, as they are both shown aggravating various situations in ways where you want to shout at the screen to tell them to stop being so difficult.

Safdie also breaks the trend by not really hinting or teasing at some upcoming opportunity for triumph — there’s no major rivalry he’s aiming to face and there’s not a cataclysmic true-life event; the whole movie just shambles along. The audience really just feels dropped into Kerr’s life in a time full of some ups and downs, and then the movie ends. The final act of the movie does reveal a major tournament Kerr is participating in, yet the stakes of this tournament and the impact it would have on Kerr’s life, regardless of the result, aren’t really explored. This is more of a feature of the movie than a bug: Kerr was part of a sport that would go on to be a dominating force in the zeitgeist, where fighters became household names, and Kerr struggled from month to month in his personal and professional life, going on to become an integral yet overlooked figure in the sport. As compared to 2023’s The Iron Claw, which was a journey through immense trauma for a family of wrestlers, lending itself to lots of melodrama and stereotypes, while Smashing Machine is a journey through relatively unremarkable events with characters you’re not given much reason to empathize with.

After his dozens of performances as an action heavyweight, Johnson finally gets to showcase his dramatic acting talents, which are…fine. The nature of the story, and of Kerr, is that he’s a reserved, stoic character whose heart is often in the right place, though he maintains a calm and collected facade. The on-screen version of Kerr jumps back and forth from being a polite, well-spoken athlete trying to defuse all tensions to getting into shouting matches with Dawn. Neither of these moods makes Kerr someone you really empathize with, yet it’s hard to deduce if Johnson is a talented actor bringing an irritating script to life or if another performer could have found ways to make Kerr more relatable. The facial prosthetics he sports also don’t do him any favors, as they only slightly transform his facial features, yet the transformation is so subtle that you often can’t tell if you’re just looking at Johnson or Johnson as Kerr. Similarly, Blunt also does her best to make Dawn engaging, but since so much of her identity is defined solely by her connection to Kerr, we never really get much insight into who she is as a person outside of her relationship. I’d argue the most compelling and empathetic character is Kerr’s best friend Mark Coleman, played by Ryan Bader, a fellow MMA fighter who’s trying to navigate supporting his best friend while also showing tough love to protect him.

Safdie won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival for Best Director, so while the movie as a whole didn’t really work for me, I can see how the filmmaker would be praised for his efforts. This is an anti-sports-movie sports movie, zigging every time you expect a story in this genre to zag. The narrative denies us the anticipated beats of sports movies, which prevents us from getting lulled into a formulaic experience, but there’s also a reason why sports movies lean into those beats. For a sports drama, it’s much more grounded and intimate than its peers, but it also focuses on figures who are both unexceptional and relatively irritating. Safdie gets some points for putting such an unconventional spin on a tried-and-true formula and Johnson gets some points for stepping outside of his comfort zone to demonstrate his performing chops, though the result is a journey that doesn’t feel like it has stakes with characters who are largely irritating.

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