If the film earns awards consideration in no other categories, “The Smashing Machine” should at least get a nod or two for wardrobe. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a hell of a time for men’s fashions, and this movie captures that perfectly.
The collars that were wider than you remember. The polo shirts that seemed somehow made specifically to be worn to a strip mall gym. The hats that looked good on Samuel L. Jackson and absolutely no one else. It’s all here, and with Sugar Ray songs playing on the radio in the background just so you don’t forget the time period you’re dealing with.
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This is a very good movie about the sport of MMA — especially at that particular moment. The attention to detail is incredible. From the logos on the mats to the idiosyncrasies of the fighters and their teams (the filmmakers even went out and found a woman who looks exactly like the tough little blonde who was always in Igor Vovchanchyn’s corner), you really feel as if you’re there at the PRIDE FC 2000 Grand Prix.
And while I had my doubts coming into this, I must admit that this is an excellent acting performance from Dwayne Johnson. I knew he could play “The Rock.” I knew he could do one the small handful of action movie tropes he’s built his Hollywood career on (my kids love him as Dr. Smolder Bravestone in “Jumanji”). I didn’t know he could do emotional nuance so well. Here, with an assist from some skillful prosthetics, he is transformed into a complicated character who is overflowing with very real and very believable internal contradictions.
But one reason it feels so real is because it was. This was Mark Kerr’s life, as we saw him live it in John Hyams’ original 2002 documentary with the same title. A lot of this film is, in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before, essentially a dramatic reenactment of an existing documentary. It covers the exact same period of Kerr’s life — no more, no less. It has basically the same arc, though with a few very well-executed scenes added in to create more emotional depth.
Those scenes do succeed in doing that, by the way. They succeed painfully and wonderfully. Some of the most dramatic scenes in this film are ones that aren’t in the documentary but absolutely feel like they could have been. This movie takes the gritty realness of the original and cranks up the volume ever so subtly while still preserving the tone and the look.
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Especially the look, in fact. Right down to the layout of Kerr’s kitchen (the home that appears in the film was an exact replica of Kerr’s, Johnson said, constructed on a sound stage with cameras built into the walls) and the outfits Kerr’s then-girlfriend, Dawn Staples, was wearing during various meltdowns.
But here’s where it gets a little weird to praise the accuracy of the film. Writer and director Benny Safdie made no secret of what he was doing here. He saw the original documentary and loved it, he said, so he decided to tell essentially the same story. In that sense, including entire scenes that are lifted straight from the documentary, almost line-for-line, with the same cuts and camera angles, could be seen as a flattering homage rather than a copycat. In other words, if he were trying to steal from the original and pass it off as his own work, he would never have stolen this much and then given his film the same exact title.
Still, it feels like of course you got the clothes and the mat logos just right. You had 93 minutes of film to study and the budgeting force of an A24 film featuring major stars to put into the effort. There’s really no excuse not to get it right.
The flip side of that is, since we do have that record to compare it to, we’d know if this was anything less than honest storytelling. And, let’s be honest, most biopics these days are. You make a movie in 2025 about a living famous person, odds are that person was heavily involved and the story is, as a result, sanitized into a dull cliche.
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That’s not the case here. If anything, “The Smashing Machine” adds several tweaks to make Kerr appear worse than he is in the documentary, or at least more at fault in his toxic relationship with Staples that feels excruciatingly real, with a lot of help from the always-amazing acting work of Emily Blunt.
Kerr has said the movie was therapeutic for him in that sense. Watching the dramatized version of his conflicts with Staples, with whom he has one son, helped him to see more fully the role he played in the relationship’s dysfunctional nature.
But it’s also hard not to wonder what people will make of this film if they haven’t seen the original documentary, which is frustratingly hard to find at the moment. Will Blunt’s excellent portrayal of Staples feel unrealistically negative and flat? Will some of the most powerful scenes — Kerr’s breakdown in the hospital, for instance, which Johnson plays exactly as it appears in the documentary — seem oddly and unnecessarily awkward?
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When you know it’s based on exactly what happened, you appreciate how deftly this movie recreates even that awkwardness. But this was a pretty niche documentary even when it was released. Now it’s been essentially lost between the couch cushions of the streaming age, and the new film makes no real effort to let you in on just how much it owes to Hyams’ original work.
That being said, this new version of “The Smashing Machine” is a success. There are no bad performances. Ryan Bader is better than you’d expect, even if he looks nothing like Mark Coleman, and Bas Rutten as Bas Rutten is absolutely perfect. The music choices are used to great effect; a long, painful scene set to the entirety of Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” is the highlight. You feel immersed in the world of early 2000s Japanese MMA without the movie ever feeling the need to slow down and explain it to you.
“The Smashing Machine” (the new version, but also the original) absolutely deserves to be considered one of the best MMA film/television depictions of all time. That puts it on a very short list, along with the 2011 film “Warrior” and the “Kingdom” TV series that ran from 2014-17.
From a distance, this might seem like pure awards bait, or a project meant solely to convince us that Johnson can do serious dramatic roles. And it might be both of those — but it succeeds at them. If a movie can do that, while also giving us the chills that only a PRIDE FC entrance can provide, it’s worth the price of admission.
