The Smashing Machine Review: Go In Expecting Nothing

We avoided this one for months. We heard the word on it wasn’t great — box office bomb, audiences gave it a B-, people walking out confused — and we filed it away as a skip. Then one evening we ran out of better options and put it on anyway, completely resigned to disappointment.

We were genuinely, completely surprised.

The Smashing Machine is directed by Benny Safdie — solo this time, without his brother Josh — and if you’ve followed the Safdie brothers’ work, you already know what you’re getting into, kind of. We came in familiar: Good Time, Marty Supreme, and of course Uncut Gems, which I really loved. That nonstop, pressure-cooker energy. The feeling that something is always about to go terribly wrong. The Smashing Machine isn’t quite that — it’s quieter, more observational — but that same undercurrent is there. The main protagonist always feels like he’s on the verge of breaking. Or exploding. You can’t quite tell which. And that tension, running underneath even the most mundane scenes, is what kept us hooked from the very first frame.

Nothing is really happening for long stretches. And yet you cannot look away.

Now. About Dwayne Johnson.

I’ll be honest — I did not think this was possible. The man has spent the better part of two decades playing Dwayne Johnson in various costumes. You know the move: the eyebrow, the smirk, the self-aware wink at the audience. Here, none of that. He plays Mark Kerr — an MMA fighter at his peak and then his collapse — as soft-spoken, fragile, and almost impossible to read. He is unrecognizable. Not just physically, though the transformation is real, but in the whole energy of the performance. This is the best acting of his career by a distance, and I say that as someone who wasn’t expecting to type that sentence.

Emily Blunt surprised us too, in a different way. There’s something slightly off-axis about her performance — like watching a very good actor make herself less predictably good. She almost didn’t feel like Emily Blunt. My wife and I both noticed it. Whether that’s the direction, the character, or something she’s consciously doing, I’m not entirely sure. But it worked.

I’m not always great at spotting what separates good direction from bad direction in real time. I know it when I feel it, but I can’t always name it. This film made it easy. Safdie shoots fights from outside the ring, through the ropes, almost at a remove — which sounds like a strange choice until you realize the whole film is about distance. About a man you can never quite get close enough to understand. The form matches the subject. That’s what good direction looks like.

The story itself? Unremarkable. There’s no great arc, no cathartic peak, no clean redemption. Mark Kerr is not a particularly inspiring figure, and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise. A lot of critics dinged it for this, and I get it — if you walked in expecting something in the vein of Creed or The Iron Claw, you would feel cheated. The consensus reading was that this is a film with everything except a reason to care about its story. And in one sense, they’re right.

But there are great films with no story. The execution here is so precise — the pace, the structure, the restraint — that the thinness of the narrative almost becomes the point. This is Safdie making a movie about a man who never became what he should have. Of course the story feels incomplete. That’s kind of the whole thing.

The film bombed at the box office. Opening weekend was Johnson’s worst ever. And I think that’s entirely because of the hype cycle — it premiered at Venice, won a prize, built award season buzz, and then arrived in theaters as a Prestige Event. That’s the wrong frame. Come to it like it’s a small movie. Come to it like you heard it was disappointing. Come to it the way we did, with no expectations whatsoever, and it will almost certainly exceed them.

Worth the watch.

3.5 out of 5.

---

Tracking what else I’ve been watching? Find me on Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/migmol