Film Review: 'The Smashing Machine' Is Dwayne Johnson's Best Performance

We go to the movies for a myriad of reasons. One of the reasons we go is to watch people transform before our eyes into characters we’ve never seen. Sometimes, they transform to the point that they’re unrecognizable. We get lost in these moments. Dwayne Johnson follows this ethos to a tee with his performance in The Smashing Machine, the Benny Safdie-directed A24 drama detailing the career of amateur wrestler/MMA fighter Mark Kerr. If there is any doubt in people's minds that Johnson could act, all disbelief is decimated by the end of the film. It is a career-best performance from The Rock, an actor who started as the ultimate heel in the WWE before pivoting to roles in family and action blockbusters that have dominated the summer and winter holiday seasons over the last fifteen years.

We meet Kerr in grainy VHS footage that starts the beginning of the film, a handheld camera shaking as he enters the ring of a wrestling match. He subdues his opponent in less than a minute. Fighting is everything to him, yet he can’t deal with the possibility that he might one day lose a fight to someone bigger and better than him. He hides behind opioids, once used to help numb his pain from vicious matches, now a crutch the get him through his days. He can’t communicate well with people around him; his doting girlfriend Dawn (a career-best performance from Emily Blunt) makes him a smoothie, but she makes it the wrong way. He pours it down the sink, in a hushed voice saying, “That’s okay, I’ll just make another one.”

His addiction problems bubble to the surface, boiling over both in screaming matches with Dawn and into the ring. He begins to deteriorate, and we watch over the course of two hours as he fights back both mentally and physically. In one incredibly effective scene, we see Johnson after he’s taken a serious beating during a match. He most likely has a concussion from being kicked in the head so many times. His opponent comes in, and they’re all smiles (an earlier scene shows him talking to a woman who asks him whether the people that are fighting actually hate each other - “Never,” he says with a warm smile). Dawn is clearly distressed, but Kerr asks her to take their picture. She lifts the small disposable camera up to her eye, and we zoom in on her face. A single tear runs down her cheek. Without saying a single word, Blunt shows a glimpse into the world of Mark Kerr at this point in history. It is electrifying acting.

Safdie - in his solo directorial debut - does an excellent job with the material. With directing, writing and editing duties under his belt, he’s great at immersing the audience into the grainy, film-saturated world of Phoenix in the late 1990s, and he has a knack for bringing out character driven performances like those in Johnson and Blunt. The focus in a scene is usually never on more than two people at a time, no scene ever feeling overcrowded. Ryan Bader, an MMA fighter in his own right, plays the foil to Kerr as Mark Coleman, his happy-go-lucky opponent/trainer/confidant that wants to win the 2000 Pride Grand Prix as much as he does. Even though they’re competing for the same thing, Coleman never shows any animosity towards Kerr - he lifts him up when he needs it the most, literally dropping everything to fly across the country when he ends up in rehab.

The Smashing Machine has the potential to be remembered as a great character-driven film, but it should be remembered as the moment when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson went from one-note action/comedy star to a bonafide true artist.

The Smashing Machine is now playing in theaters everywhere.

Release Date: October 3rd, 2025
Rated: R (for language and some drug abuse)
Running Time: 2 hours, 3 minutes

Directed by: Benny Safdie
Written by: Benny Safdie
Produced by: Benny Safdie, Dwayne Johnson, Eli Bush, Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia, David Koplan

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, Oleksandr Usyk