Benny Safdie has written and directed a solid bro drama for the UFC fanbase and maybe a little way beyond. It is about the central crisis in the life of man-mountain Mark KerrAmerica’s pioneering MMA and ultimate fighting champ, who in 1997 found himself in the ring, or maybe the cage, with his demons after the unthinkable humiliation of losing for the first time.
This feature is in fact developed from a 2002 documentary about Kerr with the same title. He confronted his substance abuse, relationship anxieties and the question of what the heck life is for if you can’t simply win all the time. Kerr is played by Dwayne Johnson, a colossus of muscle topped off with a head the size of Indiana Jones’s boulder, a body on which the only visible fat is rippling at the nape of his neck. Johnson’s appearance is modified by close-cut frizzy hair and facial prosthetics that make him look like Jon Favreau playing the Hulk. No other casting was remotely possible – not unless Timothée Chalamet fancied bulking up. (Sacha Baron Cohen could do it these days, and would probably want to play it every bit as seriously and non-satirically as Johnson.)
The terrible, existential nightmare of losing – a possibility for which no one in Kerr’s professional or personal circle appeared to have prepared him – causes that giant statue of a man to wobble and topple. Kerr has to throw his opioids in the trash, enter rehab and deal again with the important people in his life; one of them is his best buddy, sometime coach and fighting rival Mark Coleman, slightly woodenly played here by Ryan Bader, an actual MMA fighter with no acting experience who doesn’t look as exotically jacked as Kerr.
In those early days of MMA, the championship took place in Japan and it was called Pride; those hugely built male specimens would snarl, grapple and tussle under this title, and a cheekier, less brand-respectful film might have tried a gag here, or wondered if there were emotional aspects of the sport which had been left unexplored. The other person in Mark’s life, however, is his girlfriend Dawn, played with sympathy and wit by Emily Blunt, who has to cower and flinch as Mark, in a towering rage, will occasionally put his fist through the kitchen door. Immediately after the loss, Kerr has a breakdown which causes him to collapse; upon regaining consciousness, he remembers the medic testing him by asking him who the president is – he answers “Ronald Reagan”, a moment of droll political significance that Safdie doesn’t stress.
Johnson’s testy and petulant post-rehab scenes with Blunt are shrewdly insightful; he scolds her for not pruning his giant cactus properly and not getting the leaves out of the pool. Dawn realises that when her husband was drinking and the permanent throb of pain dulled with opioids, he was a sweet, loving boyfriend. Has sobriety revealed a nasty mean-minded guy who is always snitching on her to his AA sponsor? And is Dawn actually less important to Mark than his pal Coleman, whom he might have to fight for the world championship?
It’s difficult to tell. The film does not really permit the various emotional crises and issues to supersede the importance of fighting all that much, and the fighting itself is not transformed or transfigured in the drama. Even the climax of the great Kerr-Coleman face-off doesn’t make it entirely clear if Kerr has in some sense chosen his girlfriend over his friend and his sport. The movie doesn’t reach for tragedy or extreme dysfunction, like Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw from 2023 or Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher from a decade earlier, nor does Safdie go for big set pieces, like a boxing movie might, with eve-of-battle scenes in the dressing room.
However, there is one bravura moment when Kerr, in shock after his loss, walks through the corridors, politely complains to the sponsor about his opponent breaking the rules; still sweaty and in his trunks, he then goes down one floor in the elevator causing a member of the venue’s restaurant staff carrying bread to think twice about getting in with him … and then Kerr bursts into tears in his dressing room. These moments of vulnerability are touching, though I wished the film could have promoted the excellent Blunt to equal status in the drama.
