While I may not care about sports, I have always enjoyed a sports movie. Stories about ambition, determination and resilience hit relatively often for me, because there’s something we can all relate to in a story of someone fighting to achieve their dreams. And I’ve enjoyed the films the Safdie brothers have made together, and like the Coen brothers before them, Josh and Benny Safdie have directed films separately this year, both to be released this fall by A24. The first is Benny’s solo directorial debut The Smashing Machine, based on John Hyams’ 2002 documentary of the same name, about UFC fighter Mark Kerr. The Smashing Machine also allows Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to tackle a more serious role than he has previously. All, as it unfortunately turns out, resulting in diminishing returns. 

The Smashing Machine is a biopic following the life of professional wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr (Johnson). We follow his ascent to prominence and fame, and the many hardships he faces along the way, such as issues with addiction and a tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt). 

Dwyane Johnson is trying something here, I’ll give him that. He’s going (slightly) outside of his comfort zone, playing this real-life figure who is still alive and probably played a part in the production of this film. He’s the affable nice guy, the gentle giant to people he meets and talks to casually, but the people who know really know him know there’s something darker going on with him. He can put on a good show. And Johnson is fine here in a role that, it turns out, is not demanding that much of him. You don’t really notice him disappear into this character until the film is almost over, and by then, if your experience is anything like mine, you’ve been checked out for awhile by that point.

Johnson worked with Emily Blunt in Disney’s 2021 Jungle Cruise movie, and of course that’s a different kind of task for both actors, but their chemistry was so much stronger there than it is here. Part of this is because Safdie seemingly forgot to write a character for Blunt to play. Dawn is so nothing for almost this entire movie, and she’s mainly here to react to things and be a supportive sounding board for Mark when things get tough. She looks like the kind of character that who could have a big personality – her very late 90’s big hair and acrylic nails – but she seemingly has no personality and no life outside of him. This is reductive, but not necessarily unsurprising for this kind of movie. She says at one point in the second half when the two are having a fight, ‘you don’t know anything about me!’ and neither does the viewer.

Benny Safdie is taking a docudrama-ish approach to this story, and in his defense it seems like he’s trying to tiptoe around all the familiar beats and cliches we know so well from the sports movie. However he’s not doing anything else that’s particularly interesting. We wonder for so long in this movie what’s so important about this particular man’s story, because he could really just be anybody. And I had to do a quick look at Mark Kerr’s Wikipedia page afterward to understand why he mattered in the world of this sport. If the movie told me, I wouldn’t have had to look it up later. But Safdie is trying like hell to add any kind of class or artistry to this story. This is framed as a gritty, scrappy indie, but in reality this cost $50 million to produce, not including advertising costs. Cinematographer Maceo Bishop gives the film a grainy look and that sets a tone early on that suggests the movie we’re going to get will be better.

I’ll need to see Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme in a couple months before I can definitively say this, but there’s a chance the Safdie brothers going on their own and making films separately is going to go as well as when the Coen brothers do this. Because the sense of excitement or tension and the intensity of Good Time or Uncut Gems is entirely absent here. The performances underwhelm, the pacing drags, and there’s no emotional hook to get you invested. Unless you enter the film already a fan of the UFC, or wrestling in general, I don’t know if there’s going to be a lot here for you to enjoy. I’m not a fan, to be clear, in fact I find this entire enterprise to be a bit abhorrent and barbaric and I don’t get its appeal. If you are a fan of this sport, or if the idea of seeing Dwayne Johnson tackle a role that’s (kind of) outside of his comfort zone, maybe wait until this is available to stream.