Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for The Smashing Machine.
“We who wince at this gritty depiction feel a wound at our side as well.”
During orientation at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, I heard a lecture on hermeneutics and the various interpretational frameworks each person brings to the Bible. We started not with the text at hand but a famous oil painting inspired by it—Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas. My classmates noticed many facets of the masterpiece, including the intimacy of the painting, the realism of Thomas’s wrinkled face, the fleshiness of Christ’s wounded side, and the warmth of the scene’s color palette. Two comments linger with me. First, Thomas has dirt under his fingernails, causing any modern viewer to squirm from the risk of infection. Second, Christ guides Thomas into his side, snuffing out his disciple’s doubt with a loving hand.
Historian Edwin David Aponte writes regarding Thomas’s shock, “Perhaps, the surprise has to do with his unbelief. It could also be surprise at the realization that he, too, is also pierced. Indeed, St. Thomas appears to clutch his side as if he becomes aware of a wound at his side as well. And we who wince at this gritty depiction feel a wound at our side as well.”
Caravaggio’s piece does invite wincing, and the masterpiece left its mark on me as I understood my own brokenness and Christ’s intimate, redemptive embrace. But I was surprised to find myself returning to the piece when beholding a very different visual spectacle.
Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (2025) portrays the career of MMA legend Mark Kerr, played by wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Set in the late 1990s, the biographical sports drama follows Kerr’s dominance in the early days of UFC and his jump to Japan’s PRIDE Fighting Championships. As the film progresses, Safdie details Kerr’s struggle with addiction and relational turmoil with girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt), as well as his friendship with fellow fighter Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader).
“You have to ask yourself, would you stick your finger in your opponent’s cut, spread it out a little bit more just to win and make him feel pain? Would you?”
Safdie deftly chronicles the mental and physical anguish caused by Kerr’s pursuit of greatness, but not in the manner of other sports biopics. Brian Tallerico calls Safdie’s approach an “anti-biopic” that avoids clichés and usually keeps viewers at arm’s length. Fight scenes are personal but rarely in the ring; the viewer feels like a front-row fan, but nothing more. There is only one lengthy training montage, but it ends with Kerr’s trainer collapsing from a torn tendon. Even the Muzak-like score, infused with jazz and pop, transports the viewer out of the pivotal scenes for the genre. The more engaging aspects of the film would be the extra footage cut from films like Creed—small talk in doctor waiting rooms and quiet mornings in Kerr’s home kitchen.
The film opens with Kerr’s debut tournament in Brazil. Featuring a voiceover with an interview from Kerr, the scene shows Johnson’s hulking physique brutally pummeling a bloodied opponent into the mat. Each thud of his opponent’s head is more vicious than the last. Kerr relates his fighting philosophy to the interviewer.
The second that bell rings you can look at people and you can just tell, they’re scared to death. You can see it in their eyes and smell it in their sweat.
It’s simple, am I going to hurt him before he hurts me?
To physically impose my will on you…is a pretty powerful thing.
What stuck with me most was Kerr’s final statement: “You have to ask yourself, would you stick your finger in your opponent’s cut, spread it out a little bit more just to win and make him feel pain? Would you? Of course you would! You know why? Because winning is the best feeling there is.”
For a film that keeps its audience at a distance, this is what viewers need to know about Kerr’s mindset during his meteoric rise. All that matters is maintaining a grasp on dominating the ring, tournament after tournament: “By the end, you feel like a god.”’
Kerr, admittedly, is a bit ironic. He is soft spoken and rather personable, a gentle giant. But when he is in the ring, he is the titular smashing machine. Johnson delivers a haunting performance of a man enmeshed in a sport where men forge their bodies into weapons. There is a jarring scene after a Japanese tournament where Kerr converses with his opponent, and they laughingly compare the cuts and bruises they inflicted upon one another.
Yet, Kerr can’t escape the fragility of being human. He spirals into drug abuse to ease the physical toil of the sport, engendering an eventual overdose that jeopardizes his career. One image shows Kerr, comically large in a small hospital bed, sobbing in his gown—a picture of physical strength brought down by spiritual weakness.
He is also a perfectionist. Early in the film, Kerr chastises Dawn over using the wrong milk in his smoothie, a cringeworthy moment that recurs in many forms throughout the film. But his biggest addiction is winning. After an illegal knee to the head causes him to lose a match in Japan, Kerr pleads for a no contest ruling, and despite receiving his request, is haunted by the thought of his undefeated record faltering.
His obsession with winning oozes into his relationship with Dawn. Kerr’s biting remarks toward her veer into in-home violence, including a scene where he destroys a door. Although Kerr’s recovery from drug abuse brings the two closer together, he quickly absorbs himself back into his competitive ethos. This final spiral pushes Dawn to attempt suicide, forcing Kerr to break down a door—again—to restrain her. I found this aspect of the film a bit problematic; Blunt’s impeccable acting ability cannot seem to raise Dawn from a rather static characterization. Still, it displays the victimhood caused by a mindset fixated on self-praise and conquest. A recurring MMA mantra in the film says it all: “Pain is perfection, pride is forever.”
What lingers is the film’s anticlimax: a fighter who chooses to be healed rather than to be victorious.
Having watched Safdie’s filmography, like Good Time and Uncut Gems (both co-directed with his brother Josh), I anticipated The Smashing Machine to further spiral into chaos. Surprisingly, he offers some rather beautiful moments, and he ends the film on an uplifting, if poignant, note. Kerr, for all his prowess in the ring, can be kind and tender. Early in the film, he gives a child a signature in a doctor’s waiting room. He refers to his stomach as “my tummy” more than once. He and Dawn share a few tender scenes at a demolition derby and an amusement park (Kerr’s easily upset stomach prevents him from riding a roller coaster with Dawn).
The film’s most touching aspect is Kerr’s relationship with Mark Coleman, a friend, former trainer, and, eventually, a fellow competitor. When Kerr overdoses, Coleman immediately flies out to see his friend and encourage him, and Coleman serves as a consistent shoulder for Kerr to lean on. Unsurprisingly, the film builds to where the two friends might fight together at the 2000 PRIDE Grand Prix, perhaps putting their friendship on the line.
Except that it does not happen! As an “anti-biopic,” The Smashing Machine maintains an anticlimax. Before he can fight Coleman, Kerr, plagued by his broken relationship with Dawn, loses in the tournament. As the viewer watches Coleman win the prize, Mark resigns himself to receiving stitches. The penultimate scene of the story juxtaposes Coleman—alone with his championship belt after much public celebration—with Kerr, also alone but laughing and smiling in the shower.
As the complete inverse of Kerr’s initial mindset, belief arises from Christ asking us, in our own woundedness, to spread our hands into his resurrected wounds.
One might be disappointed by this muted outcome for a film about championships. However, I respect this conclusion by Safdie more than any other aspect of the film. Although not overtly religious, The Smashing Machine points toward Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, where belief is born through touching the wounds of Christ rather than denying them. “How so?” you might ask. What lingers is the film’s anticlimax: a fighter who chooses to be healed rather than to be victorious. Instead of being the fighter who will thrust his fingers into his opponent’s side for a fleeting hit of glory, Kerr recognizes what’s good for him, truly, and decides to tap out.
A leitmotif within the film is a kintsugi bowl. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the cracks with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. The result is a beautiful, unique, and even stronger piece than before it was broken. Kerr buys a kintsugi bowl in Japan for Dawn, which is later broken by her and mended once again.
To me, the greatest notion kintsugi conveys is that the scars of the pottery remain, but they are transformed into something glorious. This captures a paradoxical truth at the heart of Christian faith: Our resurrection in Christ does not erase our scars but transforms them. Consider Nancy Eisland in The Disabled God:
In the resurrected Jesus Christ, [the disciples] saw not the suffering servant for whom the last and most important word was tragedy and sin, but the disabled God who embodied both impaired hands and feet and pierced side and the imago Dei [or image of God]. Paradoxically, in the very act commonly understood as the transcendence of physical life, God is revealed as tangible, bearing the representation of the body reshaped by injustice and sin into the fullness of the Godhead.
At the end of the film, a real-life Mark Kerr pushes a shopping cart in a grocery store, brimming with joy in his virtual anonymity. Safdie paints a picture here of a man who chooses healing over victory, and asks us to remember his name.
Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:27-28 NRSV).
Kerr’s choice to acknowledge his scars, I argue, invites Christians to seek the ultimate physician. As the complete inverse of Kerr’s initial mindset, belief arises from Christ asking us, in our own woundedness, to spread our hands into his resurrected wounds. As Thomas does, let us proclaim Christ’s name when we do so.
