Venice: The Rock and Emily Blunt in "The Smashing Machine"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

The Rock stars in "THE SMASHING MACHINE"

The Smashing Machine feels familiar even if you’ve never heard of Mark Kerr. That’s part of its strength: Benny Safdie takes the real story of a man who helped shape mixed martial arts and reframes it with a clarity that cuts through the clichés of the sports genre. In the late 1990s Kerr and his friend Mark Coleman (here played by MMA veteran Ryan Bader) were pioneers, carrying American fighters to Japan’s Pride tournaments; huge, almost gladiatorial events that revealed how far the sport could go. Those who came after turned that groundwork into global stardom and multimillion-dollar careers. Kerr and Coleman, instead, were the trailblazers whose brilliance was real but whose recognition was fleeting.

This film wants to correct that. At his peak, between 1997 and 2000, Kerr was an undefeated champion. Then came the spiral: defeats, opioids, psychological collapse. But what could have been yet another story of decline is reshaped here into something richer...

Safdie follows him through rehab and relapse, but avoids the easy melodrama. Instead, he frames Kerr as a man who finds, in adversity, not only pain but also the strength to grow. His comeback is less about triumph in the ring than about learning to stand in life with a new kind of balance.

The Rock embodies this balance with a surprising quietness. He could have leaned on rage, but his Kerr speaks calmly even in moments of fury, choosing discipline where destruction would be easier. He remains clean even when temptation fills his home. He admits, with disarming lucidity, that he doesn’t want children—not because he is heartless, but because he knows he cannot give them the stability they would need. These details make him more than a broken fighter: they make him a man capable of facing his limits without denial.

The relationship with Dawn Staples-Kerr (Emily Blunt) is the other axis of the film. She is not the supportive partner of most sports dramas. She destabilizes him, demands attention, and nearly triggers his relapses. Yet Safdie and Blunt resist turning her into caricature. Their love story becomes another form of addiction—destructive, magnetic, impossible to ignore. It is through Dawn as much as through fighting that Kerr must learn the difference between dependency and love, between craving and care.

The comparison with The Wrestler is inevitable, but The Smashing Machine works differently. Aronofsky built his film on extremity, on a body collapsing under the weight of pain. Safdie looks for something quieter: the resilience of a man who loses but keeps standing, who discovers that maturity is itself a kind of victory. If The Wrestler was about the impossibility of leaving the ring, The Smashing Machine is about the possibility of surviving it.

For Dwayne Johnson, this is more than a role. It is the film that allows him to cross from the spectacle of blockbusters to the terrain of “serious actor.” He uses his body, of course—how could he not—but for once his physicality is there to support restraint rather than excess. Safdie surrounds him with handheld immediacy, restless rhythm, and a refusal of cheap emotional shortcuts. The result is a film that knows the conventions of its genre but doesn’t settle for them. It finds its own voice: steady, clear, and far more powerful than expected.

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