The Smashing Machine (2025)
Directed by Benny Safdie
In the late 1990s, up-and-coming mixed martial artist Mark Kerr aspires to become the greatest fighter in the world. However, he must also battle his opioid dependence and a volatile relationship with his girlfriend Dawn.
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24 films that influenced The Smashing Machine
What critics say influenced The Smashing Machine
Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine depict this in two different sports and eras, but they come to a similar conclusion: masculinity is a performance.
One senses Safdie wishes to make something closer to the psychological devastation of Raging Bull…
…rather than the evocative and intimate close-ups that have defined masterworks like Raging Bull…
If you’re thinking about pugilists like LaMotta (of RAGING BULL) fame or Muhammad Ali, then you’re in a different arena.
From its opening scenes, Safdie appears to be reaching for the harrowing psychological intensity of films like Raging Bull or Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher.
…like Raging Bull, it finds simple, poetic beauty in the ring…
Rocky and Creed are great, but they do glorify boxing as something heroic and/or intrinsically American.
The Smashing Machine’s anti-biopic approach plays more like a modern, realist update of “Rocky” and less like a revisionist take on the “Rocky” sequels.
…and like Rocky, it finds failure meaningful…
Where other sports films, from Rocky to The Iron Claw, get up close and personal with the characters, essentially getting in the ring with them, Safdie and team unwisely maintain a degree of separation.
Even in the case of something like Rocky, it doesn’t even matter that he loses to Apollo Creed, as merely holding his own feels like a triumph.
…a similar, world-weary vulnerability that Sylvester Stallone showed in ROCKY…
Similar to Sydney Sweeney’s Christy biopic about boxer Christy Martin, The Smashing Machine is unconventional in that success for Kerr isn’t just measured in the winning of titles.
Even just earlier this year, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson had to grow even more muscles and don facial prosthetics for The Smashing Machine, apparently to prove he is very strong and can act while being strong.
This is the second boxing-centered transformation drama of the year, following Dwayne Johnson’s “The Smashing Machine,” and like Johnson, Sweeney fully commits.
…in an Oscar season surprisingly rife with offbeat sports biopics (The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, each by one of the Safdie brothers)…
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, The Testament of Ann Lee, Blue Moon, The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, Hamnet, and more are at the front of said queue…
Much like The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere with Jeremy Allen White, Christy marches diligently alongside 2025's middling, performance-forward biographies…
…rather than the evocative and intimate close-ups that have defined masterworks like Raging Bull and even The Wrestler…
Certainly not on par with De Niro in Raging Bull or Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, both of whom viscerally tapped into the vulnerabilities of their characters and how it fuelled their demons.
Mickey Rourke showcased in THE WRESTLER…
…it’s a portrait of a fighter a la The Wrestler for sure…
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…sticking with the sporting world of Lenny Cooke and Uncut Gems…
Safdie directs with the same nervy intensity that defined Uncut Gems, but here that energy is turned inward…
Safdie’s direction is very intimate and tight, almost paying homage to the chaotic handheld movements of Uncut Gems…
Like the Safdie’s classic “feel so bad it’s good” projects Good Time and Uncut Gems, the film looks incredible.
Safdie employs a fly-on-the-wall approach that echoes Uncut Gems…
It’s cool to see this fixation applied to a non-fiction story rather than someone as “larger than life” as Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems.
As compared to 2023’s The Iron Claw, which was a journey through immense trauma for a family of wrestlers, lending itself to lots of melodrama and stereotypes, while Smashing Machine is a journey through relatively unremarkable events with characters you’re not given much reason to empathize with.
Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw (2023)…
Every sad wrestling film (“Foxcatcher,” “The Iron Claw,” “Cassandro”) usually gives a sense of quotidian routine…
Where other sports films, from Rocky to The Iron Claw, get up close and personal with the characters, essentially getting in the ring with them, Safdie and team unwisely maintain a degree of separation.
Bennet Miller’s Foxcatcher (2014)…
Every sad wrestling film (“Foxcatcher,” “The Iron Claw,” “Cassandro”) usually gives a sense of quotidian routine…
From its opening scenes, Safdie appears to be reaching for the harrowing psychological intensity of films like Raging Bull or Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher.
Like the Safdie’s classic “feel so bad it’s good” projects Good Time and Uncut Gems, the film looks incredible.
…this is a film that feels quite out of place following Good Time and Uncut Gems.
Despite Benny having co-directed with brother Josh two of the most intense thrillers of this century—Good Time and the stone-cold masterpiece that is Uncut Gems…
It doesn’t have the visceral chaos of a Good Time or an Uncut Gems, but it has plenty of thoughts about masculinity and its role in modern sports.
…the fractious immediacy and hyper-stylised chaos that characterised Good Time (2017)…
Safdie is known for bringing intensity to films with his brother Josh, with the likes of Good Time and Uncut Gems…
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It’s rather disappointing that The Smashing Machine is essentially a beat-for-beat recreation of John Hyams’ remarkable 2002 HBO documentary of the same name.
This scene, as well as many others throughout The Smashing Machine, is recreated verbatim from John Hyams’s 2002 documentary of the same name about Mark.
The Smashing Machine, overshadowed by John Hyams’ 2002 documentary of the same name…
Sharing the same name as John Hyams’ 2002 documentary…
Now an action flick superstar, who first gained fame in another fighting ring, gets a chance to show off his dramatic skills (along with his impressive pecs) as the athlete dubbed (in an acclaimed HBO documentary) THE SMASHING MACHINE.
Inspired by a 2002 documentary of the same name, Safdie’s film depicts three eventful years in the career of MMA pioneer Mark Kerr…
…sticking with the sporting world of Lenny Cooke and Uncut Gems…
And some authentic, like the eponymous subject of 2013’s “Lenny Cooke.”