A Gentle Giant

There’s a famous pro-wrestling promo by two-time Olympian and WWE world champion Mark Henry in which he talks about being told all the time that he was too big, too strong, that he had to be careful with other kids because he would break them.

Every time Dwayne Johnson steps onscreen in biopic The Smashing Machine, it’s like he took Henry’s words to heart in creating his version of mixed martial arts pioneer Mark Kerr. A former WWE champion himself as the Rock, Johnson has always been big and muscular, but here he is gigantic, his body restructured to capture the real Kerr’s bulk. But at the same time, he’s constantly pulling back, always trying to take up less space, never raising his voice, devastating his opponents in the ring by sheer brute force and then plaintively asking the ref if they’re OK, like it’s a schoolyard tussle that got out of hand.

Anyone fearing that the film would become more publicity for the Trump-favored UFC need not fear, as The Smashing Machine instead concentrates on Kerr’s time in Japan’s PRIDE promotion. MMA fans will know this was a bleak time for Kerr, when his neuroses and addiction constantly got the better of him.

Johnson’s performance is built around the contradictions of Kerr, a man of violence but in constant retreat from himself. When Kerr and his girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Blunt), go to the amusement park and she insists on riding the fast-spinning Gravitron, he gently demurs because it will upset his tummy. Not his stomach, but his tummy.

The Smashing Machine dodges the conventions of the standard sports biopic because of that central performance – or rather, the composite creation of Kerr. It’s the seamlessness of writer/director Benny Safdie’s script and how an unrecognizable Johnson disappears into it, and then how cinematographer Maceo Bishop captures Johnson in long shots in which he still fills the screen and in close-ups so tight that the scars on each pore are revealed. It doesn’t stop there: It’s in the sound, like the subtly amplified thud-thud-thud of Kerr’s footsteps as he walks to the ring, a titan bound by his own fears. There’s a physical intimacy about the transformation wrought by Kerr’s fighting, a closeness that bizarrely evokes Shinya Tsukamoto’s techno-body horror Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The result is that, even when Bishop is following Johnson from behind, seemingly mere inches from his bulging traps, as he walks through the empty halls of a Japanese arena, his inner conflicts are apparent.

While the script centers on Kerr and Staples’ volatile relationship, Johnson’s real partner here is a surprisingly nuanced and touching performance from an actual MMA legend, Ryan Bader, playing Kerr’s friend, rival, and coach, Mark Coleman. It’s not necessarily an indicator that Bader should take up acting (not least because he deserves better than the torrent of mid-tier action scripts he’d probably be offered), but here he’s perfectly cast, bringing an honesty and earnestness to his scenes that’s clearly born of personal experience. There’s a moment in the PRIDE locker room in which his pain and inner confusion is juxtaposed against Kerr’s, and in its raw insight there’s a realization that this story could have been about either man. Safdie’s deeply moving script isn’t really about Kerr’s win-loss record, or how he overcame defeat and addiction to climb to the top of the mountain. In Kerr and Coleman he tackles the vulnerabilities of masculinity, of doing what a manly man is supposed to do and still not fitting in. In its unexpectedly sweet coda, Safdie sends a message that it’s OK to accept that discomfort. Like Johnson’s Kerr, The Smashing Machine is a surprisingly gentle giant.

This article appears in October 3 • 2025.