The Smashing Machine, written, directed, edited, and co-produced by Benny Safdie, pointedly taps into the wrestling-world bona fides of its star, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The movie sees the 53-year-old actor and part-time WWE villain play, with the help of a fake nose and an out-of-character full head of hair, Mark Kerr, a pioneering wrestler and mixed martial artist whose story he bought the rights to in 2008. (A few years ago, Johnson approached Safdie and his brother, Josh — who’ve accumulated much cred among cineastes over the last decade with helter-skelter movies like 2014’s Heaven Knows What, 2017’s Good Time, and 2019’s Uncut Gems — to come onboard as collaborators on a potential biopic, thinking their realism-forward aesthetic sensibility would be an apt fit.) 

The resulting movie, based on the 2002 HBO documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr, marks a change of pace for both Safdie and Johnson. For the former because the film is the first time he’s helmed a movie sans older brother; for Johnson because, despite the movie having him play someone who doesn’t stray too far from his persona, it’s notably the first quote-unquote serious movie he’s headlined since the big-swinging, still-polarizing epic Southland Tales (2006). (You don’t have to have seen every film he’s made since then to know the type of character he’s happiest to embody: the affable tough guy with a Schwarzeneggerian amount of muscle who never loses a fight because he contractually obligates it.)  

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Photo credit: A24