Venice #82 - The Smashing Machine

Benny Safdie flies solo in his first feature without his brother, Josh, and I’ll admit I braced myself for the post-Coen effect: the couple splits, the magic fizzles, and suddenly you’re watching Drive Away Dolls. But fear not: Safdie proves himself here, holding onto the raw, electric vision that made Good Time and Uncut Gems so propulsive, while giving it a new muscular tenderness.

On paper, it’s a sports biopic about professional wrestler Mark Kerr. In practice, it’s something richer: an honest character study, always observational rather than exploitational, and mercifully free of the genre’s usual sentimental sludge. And that’s a deliberate choice since Kerr, still alive and relatively in shape, doesn’t even carry a particularly distinguished, nor dramatic story. Safdie resists the urge to chart the wrestler’s entire life or moralise about his demons. Instead, he just lets us watch: this muscle mountain making a perfectly calibrated milkshake, or stumbling under Tokyo’s neon glow, looking like a lost Godzilla. Kerr is a paradox, a gentle giant who likes to win, but fights with animal instinct in the ring. The mundane becomes cinematic, and the spectacle of violence is countered by the quiet grace of a man who treats fighting like a vocational art form, as disciplined as ballet. Yet the film never glamorises the sport itself, wisely treating Kerr’s love of the craft as just another bruise in his battered identity.

And then there’s Dwayne Johnson. Safdie’s casting choice feels cosmically inevitable, as if fate had been crouched in the corner, waiting for the bell to ring on this matchup. Because Johnson was born to play Kerr, finally stepping into a film with a script that doesn’t just use his bulk, but his humanity. He moves through the part with an unforced vulnerability, as if he’s been waiting years to shed the superhero armour and just… feel things. Flashback to 2001: you’re watching The Mummy Returns and The Rock emerges as the glitchy Scorpion King, in full CGI galore. The idea that 25 years later he’d be chasing an Oscar would’ve sounded like fantasy, even for Hollywood.

The writing is equally sharp, calibrating action and stillness with precision, knowing when to explode and when to let silences do the heavy lifting. There’s something almost thrilling in watching a character do something trivial and still feel the tension coil around the room.

With The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie shows he can step into the ring alone and come out with his hands raised. And Dwayne Johnson finally gets to prove that even (The) Rock can cry.

4/5