(123 mins, 15, in cinemas 3 October)
In his new film, we are promised, Dwayne Johnson is unrecognisable. Through a mystical combination of performance and prosthetics, one of the most famous men in the world — a 300 lb, 6’4” WWE-wrestler-turned-box-office-titan worth an estimated $800 million dollars — has disappeared so far into the role, he’s been rendered invisible. Some people are saying it’s the finest acting he’s ever done. But these people know nothing of pro wrestling, or masculinity as gender performance in 2025.
Obviously, The Rock’s rock-hard bod is still clearly visible, regardless. This is both because no amount of make-up or wardrobe wizardry could obscure those guns, and because, in The Smashing Machine, Johnson plays another man who made a living from his muscles. Mark Kerr is a mixed martial arts pioneer and two-time UFC heavyweight champion, who spent the period covered in the film (1997 - 2000) battling for supremacy in his infamously brutal sport of choice, while also navigating an addiction to painkillers and a tempestuous relationship with his first wife, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt).
Also stepping up to the ring here is US writer-director Benny Safdie. He’s already well regarded as the co-director of several critically acclaimed films with his older brother Josh, including 2019’s Adam Sandler-starring nerve-jangler Uncut Gems, and now he’s making this bid for inclusion in a grander auteurist tradition.
All the big hitters have their fight movies. The most-revered include Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss, Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Stallone’s Rocky (the latter instalments of which he directed, as well as starring in and writing). The more recent run from welterweight weepie The Wrestler, to melodrama The Iron Claw. These are films which explore masculinity through its most cartoonishly extreme proponents, while also drawing a comparison between the male professional fighter and his lady, often a sex worker of sorts, who utilises her own hyper-feminine physicality to get by. In The Smashing Machine, Staples (Blunt) has boobs to match Kerr’s brawn, and long manicured fingernails by way of fists, but, still Kerr’s most significant other — his true equal — is fellow fighter Mark Coleman (played by real-life MMA fighter, Ryan Bader).
It’s a genre in which Johnson’s current campaign to be taken more seriously as an actor can dovetail neatly with his long-time screen persona. In the quarter-century since a wrestler known as ‘The Rock’ made his big-screen debut in The Mummy Returns, that ring name has been excised from Johnson’s official acting credit, but the gag remains the same. It’s The Rock wearing a tutu in The Tooth Fairy (2010), or The Rock enthusing about unicorns in Central Intelligence (2016), or The Rock being the ultimate dad to a daughter in the Fast and Furious franchise (2011-2023). Every Dwayne Johnson movie asks this same question: how could one man be so tough and yet so tender?
Safdie’s direction takes this and builds from it a pleasingly sensory exploration of what makes a man a man. When Kerr takes his temper out on a door, it tears in half, as easily as tissue paper. There’s a slinky experimental jazz score by Nala Sinephro, several merciless close-ups on Kerr’s greasy bald-spot and an (admittedly laboured) metaphor about the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which makes broken objects more beautiful through their gold-lacquered repair.
What’s lost in the textural mix is the tension which ran taut through the Safdie brothers’ recent films like a two-hour panic attack. Kerr never really poses a physical threat to Dawn (the opposite; he is her protector) and while, initially at least, he shares the Safdie hero’s obsessive drive to come out on top, at heart he’s always a more placid, companionable character than either Robert Pattinson’s Connie in Good Time or Adam Sandler’s Howard in Uncut Gems.
Might Johnson’s embodiment of the tough/tender dichotomy serve as an attractive and urgently needed alternative to the virulent misogyny of the YouTube manosphere? What if, lads, we could express our emotions and still be considered hard? An early scene establishes Kerr as kind to kids and the elderly and, over the course of the film, he proves to be a plain-dealing, good guy, whose only real moral failing was to love a complicated woman.
And herein lies a minor flaw with The Smashing Machine as an elevated fight flick, a Brecht for beefcakes: Kerr’s hero’s journey to his athletic peak and back again relies on a bros-before-hoes philosophy which risks side-stepping toxic masculinity only to sink deeper into an older — Biblical, if not primordial — swamp of misogyny. Dawn is portrayed as the Eve who leads Adam into sin. It doesn’t even matter that it was Kerr’s own idea to shave off his remaining hair — or that he looks so much better without it — she’s still a Delilah to his Samson.
It’s minor though, because everything is, compared to Johnson’s IMAX screen-filling form. And who knows, maybe in Kerr and Dawn’s case, it did all actually go down like this. The Smashing Machine is based on a 2002 documentary of the same name, and Johnson has been friendly with the real Kerr since the ‘90s, when they frequented the same gyms. By the time the bell rings, even the pummelling blows of sports biopic cliche have been subdued by the forceful charms of a true movie star.
THREE MORE TO SEE
Anthony Ramos as Major Daniel Gonzalez in A House of Dynamite
1. A House of Dynamite (15), directed by Kathryn Bigelow. In UK cinemas 3 Oct, streaming on Netflix 24 Oct
Here’s Bigelow back doing what she does best: a cerebral action-thriller depicting disciplined, dutiful US military personnel at work to avert disaster. It’s terrifyingly plausible, too. Except for the bit where the president actually gives a toss.
2. The Curse of Frankenstein (12), directed by Terence Fisher. In UK cinemas from 2 Oct
In the run-up to Guillermo del Toro’s starry new take on the monster classic, this 1957 Hammer Horror shocker has been given a gore-tastic 4K restoration, with Peter Cushing as the brilliant-but-barmy scientist and Christopher Lee as his lumbering, lurching creature.
3. Power Station (12A), directed by Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell. In UK cinemas 3 Oct
A pair of filmmaker-artist-activists reveal themselves to be the ultimate power couple in this heart-warming — and, ideally, house-warming — documentary, about turning one North East London street into a self-sufficient, solar-panelled haven. EEJ