Release date: 3 October 2025 (UK)

Director: Benny Safdie

Producers: Dwayne Johnson, Benny Safdie, Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia, Eli Bush, David Koplan

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, Oleksandr Usyk

Production companies: A24, Seven Bucks Productions, Out for the Count

Running time: 2h 3m

Distributed by: A24

Boxing films (or in this case, smashing films) are sort of their own genre, aren’t they? I’ve never really got into them (that one with Hilary Swank upset me) but I do like a sports film, or rather, anything where someone gets obsessed with something they’re really, really good at.

They tend to fall into one of three categories: from humble beginnings to great success (Queen’s Gambit); downfall (Raging Bull) or triumph over tragedy (greatest of all sports films, Cool Runnings). So when this one opened with great success, it seemed likely that a downfall was a-coming. (There’s some sort of metaphor in here about the whole experience of having a baby, but I’ll leave it unsaid.)

Dwayne the Rock plays smashy smashy man Mark Kerr, an MMA fighter whose USP, in the sport’s early days, appears to have been that he always won, and that he was terribly nice about it afterwards. (‘I just want to check he’s ok’, he politely asks a ref of the man whose face he’s just pulverised.)

I think maybe we find smashing films so interesting because we can’t quite understand how these two personas can coexist. How do MMA fighters manage to be so nakedly violent and then function in the normal world, with all its restraint and nuance. The answer, of course, is that they often don’t. A lot of the narrative tension comes from wondering if Emily Blunt, who plays Kerr’s partner Dawn, is going to make it through the film without bruises.

There are rules to the fighting, it turns out, and they’re quite similar to the rules of breastfeeding (no biting, no head butts, no eye gouging). Like breastfeeding, they are often overlooked. The downfall, when it comes, is simply the loss of a fight, which hits Kerr so hard (mentally and physically) that he enters a downward spiral of drugs and angst. This has been foreshadowed by a lot of talk beforehand about the enormous rush of winning, and what a high it is - a massive massive high, the biggest high - repeated often enough that there’s no chance you won’t get the drugs analogy.

This isn’t really a downfall film, though. Not long after the spiral, Kerr successfully completes rehab and seems to be sorting his life out. It’s not a rise to success film either (I mean, he’s not exactly a household name is he?), nor is it a dramatic story of triumph over adversity. The film just sort of - happens, and then it ends. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take from it other than, life be like that sometimes.

Not that there weren’t (surprisingly) some moments to identify with. ‘Am I going to need stitches?’ Kerr asks a post fight doctor in a wobbly voice, to which the doctor replies, in a very gentle tone, ‘there’s going to be a few stitches, yes.’ ‘Is it bad?’ Kerr asks. ‘It’s not that bad’ the doctor says, and you just know he’s lying. I had a very similar conversation with a midwife about 5 months ago.

I definitely recommend going to see this one with a friend who knows something about the world of - I don’t even know what it’s called actually - fighting sports? Fighty punchy games? Anyway, it was interesting hearing that so many of the actors are figures from the real world of boxing/MMA, and it also helped explain some of the weird acting choices. In the end, I think this one tried too hard to be faithful to the true story, which doesn’t have a particularly satisfying narrative arc.

This is particularly a problem for Emily Blunt’s character - by far the most interesting performance, her character gets sort of randomly dumped towards the end, and we never really get the chance to see things from her point of view. ‘I just want you to treat me like a man’ Kerr pleads with her, shortly after going smashy smashy on a door, and of course there’s something in here about masculinity and violence and what it all means, but I’m not sure if it’s anything we haven’t heard before. If we’re fascinated by these films because we wonder why men do this, isn’t the question of why women are drawn to those men just as interesting?

Good things: Emily Blunt. Dwayne the Rock is actually pretty good, although the Oscar talk, while not ‘Donald Trump wins the Nobel Peace Price’ levels of silly, does feel a bit over the top.

Bad things: when you’re determined to stick to the true story, you can get a bit stuck sometimes. I know this because I once tried to write a novel about an 18th century expedition that got stuck on a tiny little island for several months, during which time very little actually happened.

My review: Sometimes we gotta fictionalise!

Lily’s review: 0 poos, 0 eye gouging, minimal biting.

Next week: I Swear. We’ve been getting ads for this one for WEEKS now, I feel like I’ve already seen it?

The Smashing Machine

After the Hunt

One Battle After Another