“The Smashing Machine”: The Rock’s Best Performance, Trapped in a Mediocre Movie

There’s a cruel irony to The Smashing Machine: a movie about a man fighting his own demons ends up being defeated by its own script. It’s the kind of film that promises greatness — the return of a superstar in a role that should redefine his career — and almost delivers it. Almost.

Let’s start with the good news, because there’s not a ton of it: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson finally acts. Really acts. For once, he isn’t cracking wise, flexing his way through explosions, or grinning like a demigod. Instead, he’s broken, fragile, desperate — and it’s shockingly effective. Johnson’s portrayal of Mark Kerr, the real-life MMA legend, is easily the best performance of his career. It’s raw, unguarded, and deeply uncomfortable in all the right ways. The problem is, everything around him can’t keep up.

The Smashing Machine wants to be both an intense sports drama and a psychological study of a man crumbling under pressure. It never quite figures out how to do either. The story follows Kerr through his meteoric rise in the early days of mixed martial arts — the blood, the chaos, the newfound fame — and his eventual downward spiral into addiction and emotional collapse. That should be gripping material. It’s an inherently fascinating life: a decorated wrestler turned fighter, a man cheered as a machine but destroyed by the weight of his own success. But the film keeps undercutting itself with a script that feels incomplete — like a rough draft of something that could’ve been great if it had gone through two more rewrites.

Scenes don’t build momentum; they just happen. Kerr’s inner turmoil is mentioned but not deeply explored. His relationship with his girlfriend (played by Emily Blunt, who does what she can) is supposed to ground him emotionally, but their moments together veer between intense and nonsensical. One minute, they’re tender, the next, they’re throwing furniture, and the film never makes clear why. It’s like watching a collection of powerful fragments — each with potential — that never add up to a satisfying whole.

Still, when the film works, it’s because of Johnson. This is easily his most interesting role to date, precisely because it forces him to strip away everything that made him “The Rock.” The charisma, the confidence, the control — gone. What’s left is a man who can’t control anything: his career, his relationships, his body. Johnson dives into Kerr’s pain with surprising humility. It’s startling to watch him lose. To see him vulnerable. To see the muscle-bound megastar genuinely small for once. There are moments — long, quiet stretches between fights — where Johnson looks like a man trying to remember who he used to be before the world started calling him a machine. Those are the moments when The Smashing Machine actually lives up to its title.

You can tell Johnson wanted this to be his dramatic breakthrough — the role that would silence critics who’ve called him a one-note action figure. And to his credit, he delivers. But the movie around him doesn’t give him the structure or support that the performance deserves.

Benny Safdie’s direction is both the film’s blessing and its curse. Safdie, known for Uncut Gems, has a knack for chaotic realism — that sense of being trapped in a world that’s constantly about to collapse. That energy works in a film like Uncut Gems, where the manic pacing feeds the story. But in The Smashing Machine, that same restless style feels at odds with the material.

Instead of intensity, we get disconnection. Safdie’s camera lingers too long on silence, cuts away too early from catharsis, and spends entire sequences focusing on the idea of pain rather than letting us feel it. The fights, which should be the movie’s anchor, often feel like afterthoughts. They’re shot from odd angles, muted by quick edits, drained of their physical thrill. That might be intentional — Safdie seems more interested in the emotional toll of fighting than the spectacle — but when the emotional storytelling also feels hollow, the result is a film that’s neither visceral nor profound.

What hurts most about The Smashing Machine is that you can feel the greatness trying to break through. It’s there in Johnson’s eyes. It’s there in the film’s themes — addiction, identity, masculinity, the body as both a weapon and a cage. But the screenplay never digs into those ideas with real conviction. We see Kerr popping pills, snapping at loved ones, and crumbling after losses — but we never get a sense of what’s happening inside him. Why does he fight? Why does he keep destroying himself? What’s he chasing? The movie gestures at those questions without answering any of them.

Emily Blunt’s character could’ve been the emotional counterweight, but the writing gives her little to do beyond worry and weep. Their relationship is supposed to be tragic, but it mostly comes across as messy for the sake of being messy. It’s one of those cinematic relationships that seems to exist only because the script needs drama, not because the characters truly connect. Even Kerr’s professional journey feels strangely muted. For a film about one of MMA’s early icons, we learn surprisingly little about the sport itself. The world of early cage fighting — the politics, the brutality, the makeshift culture of it all — should’ve been rich territory. Instead, it’s treated like background noise.

 

The strangest thing about The Smashing Machine is that Johnson is too good for it. His performance feels imported from a better movie — one that actually understands the depth of its protagonist. He’s giving Oscar-caliber energy in a film that’s not built to hold it. There’s a scene where Kerr just stares at himself in the mirror, bruised and half-broken, whispering, “You’re still in control.” It’s quiet, uncomfortable, real. It’s a moment that captures the contradiction at the heart of the film: a man built to destroy others, utterly unable to save himself. If the rest of the film had matched that honesty, we’d be talking about a modern sports masterpiece. Instead, we get something that feels like a rough sketch of greatness.

To be clear, The Smashing Machine isn’t an outright failure. It’s not incompetent. It’s just… frustrating. You can see the film that could’ve been hiding underneath the one that exists. There are flashes of brilliance — in the acting, the cinematography, the intimate moments of quiet despair. But the connective tissue that should tie those elements together is missing. The pacing is off, the structure feels meandering, and the emotional beats don’t land as hard as they should. It’s the kind of film you admire in pieces but never fully fall into.

What it does do successfully is prove that Dwayne Johnson is capable of much more than Hollywood usually asks of him. He’s always been charismatic, but here he’s human. Fragile. Fallible. It’s easily the best argument yet for him to leave the spandex and catchphrases behind and chase something riskier.

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In the end, The Smashing Machine feels like a beautiful failure — a powerful performance stranded in a story too weak to hold it. It’s an artfully shot, thematically ambitious mess, elevated almost entirely by Johnson’s dedication. If nothing else, it should serve as a turning point for his career. It’s proof that he can do more than save the world with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. He can break our hearts, too. But while The Rock came to fight, the film around him forgot how to land a punch.

The Smashing Machine Grade: B- for performance, D+ for screenplay — call it a flawed contender that goes down swinging.