The Rock’s Best Performance—And That’s the Problem

The Smashing Machine wants to be the kind of bruising, adult biopic that leaves you rattled—one of those films where the body is a diary and every win costs something you can’t name. Instead, it often plays like a prestige-coated Lifetime movie: a domestic melodrama with fight scenes, big feelings translated into blunt dialogue, and plot beats that arrive the way explanations do in therapy—useful, earnest, and a little dead on the page.

That’s not a cheap shot at the material. The story it’s working with should hurt. Benny Safdie’s film tracks legendary MMA fighter Mark Kerr—played by Dwayne Johnson—through the warp and weft of greatness: the obsession, the appetite, the private collapse that doesn’t stop just because the arena lights come on. And as a basic proposition, “The Rock disappears into a real person” is already an event; this is Johnson’s most serious, most committed performance to date.

But commitment isn’t the same thing as connection.

Johnson brings a new kind of restraint—less eyebrow, more silence, more weight in the pauses. He’s clearly trying to locate Kerr’s interior life, not just imitate the externalities. When the film lets him sit in shame or confusion, it works better than you expect. Still, the performance reveals the ceiling he’s always had: Johnson can project presence all day, but emotional specificity is harder for him. Even in his best scenes, you can feel the actor reaching for the note rather than living inside it. Which is why calling this his best performance is true—and also faint praise. The bar isn’t high; it’s just finally in the right stadium.

Emily Blunt is the reason the film feels human. As Dawn—Kerr’s partner—she doesn’t “support” the story so much as give it a pulse. Where the movie often explains, Blunt implies. Where Johnson’s performance sometimes announces its seriousness, Blunt makes hers look like breathing. She steals the show not with big speeches, but with the accumulating evidence of a person trying to love someone who is becoming unlivable: the tight smile that says not in front of them, the exhausted patience that reads like grief in real time, the flashes of anger that aren’t dramatized so much as permitted.

The real issue is the screenplay’s reliance on exposition—heavy, obvious, and frequently timed like a hammer. The film keeps choosing information over experience. Instead of letting a scene settle into its emotional weather, it rushes to clarify the stakes, explain the dynamic, label the wound. There are stretches where characters speak in summary, not conversation—dialogue that feels written to catch the viewer up rather than draw the viewer in. It’s especially damaging in a story like this, because addiction, ambition, and intimacy aren’t primarily understood through facts. They’re understood through repetition, through mood, through the small humiliations that don’t fit neatly into a plot point.

That’s where the “glorified Lifetime movie” feeling comes from: not the subject matter, but the delivery. The movie often frames pain as a sequence of crises with clearly stated meanings—hurt, reveal, fight, reconcile, repeat—rather than as an atmosphere that slowly changes the temperature of everyone in the room. When it’s at its most literal, it accidentally dodges the very thing it’s trying to capture: the way someone can be celebrated in public and drowning in private, and how the people who love them end up speaking in survival strategies.

And because the film is so eager to keep the narrative moving, it misses opportunities to let us bond with Kerr as a person rather than observe him as a case study. I didn’t feel connected to Johnson’s Kerr—not because the character is unlikable (he often is), but because the movie doesn’t trust quiet enough to make him legible. The best sports biopics understand that the “sport” isn’t the point; it’s the language the character uses to avoid saying what’s wrong. Here, the movie keeps translating that language for us, when what we needed was to feel it.

There are flashes of the film it could have been: moments when Safdie’s grit, the physicality, and Blunt’s grounded intelligence align and the movie stops explaining itself long enough to get under your skin. Those scenes don’t make the whole thing work—but they do suggest Johnson is capable of more if he keeps choosing directors who demand it, and they confirm Blunt can walk into a film that’s slipping and still make you watch her anyway.

In the end, The Smashing Machine is watchable, sometimes absorbing, occasionally powerful—just not as deep as it wants to be. It reaches for bruised prestige, but too often settles for neatly packaged suffering. Come for the curiosity of “The Rock in a real performance,” stay for Emily Blunt quietly doing the kind of acting that makes everyone else look like they’re trying.