Bart Enny Safdie has written and directed a solid bro drama for the UFC fan base and maybe a little beyond. It’s about the central crisis of Man Mountain Mark Kerr, America’s pioneering MMA and Ultimate Fighting Champ, who in 1997 found himself in the ring, or perhaps in the cage, with his demons after the unimaginable humiliation of losing for the first time.
The feature is actually developed from a 2002 documentary about Kerr of the same name. He dealt with his substance abuse, relationship troubles, and the question of what the heck life is if you can’t just win all the time. Kerr is played by Dwayne Johnson, a muscular colossus topped with an Indiana Jones-sized boulder, a body on which the only visible fat is a roll at the nape of his neck. Johnson’s appearance is modified by tightly cropped frizzy hair and facial prosthetics that make him look like Jon Favreau playing the Hulk. No other casting was remotely close—unless Timothée Chalamet came up with the idea. (Sacha Baron Cohen could do it these days, and would probably want to play it as earnestly and unsatisfactorily as Johnson.)
The terrifying, existential nightmare of losing — a possibility for which no one in Kerr’s professional or personal circle seems to have prepared him — causes the giant statue of the man to drag and light up. Kerr has to throw his opioids in the trash, enter rehab, and reconnect with the important people in his life; one of them is his best friend, sometime trainer, and fight rival Mark Coleman, played here slightly by Ryan Bader, an actual MMA fighter with no acting chops who doesn’t look as exotically designed as Kerr.
In those early days of MMA, the championship was held in Japan and was called Pride; those of heavily built male specimens would have sobbed, clutched and snarled at the name, and a more somber, less brand-honoring film might have tried a gag here or wondered if there were emotional aspects of the sport that hadn’t been left unexplored. The other person in Mark’s life, however, is his girlfriend Dawn, played with compassion and wit, whom Emily Blunt, who has to confront and counter as Mark, will occasionally throw her fist through the kitchen door in a fit of rage. Immediately after the loss, Kerr has a breakdown that sends him into a coma; upon regaining consciousness, he remembers the medic examining him asking him who the president is – he replies “Ronald Reagan” – a moment of droll political significance that Safdie doesn’t force.
Johnson’s testy and petulant follow-up scenes with Blunt are stunningly immersive; he berates her for not pruning her giant cactus properly and not getting out of the pool. Dawn realizes that when her husband is drinking and in constant pain, confused by opioids, he was a nice, loving boyfriend. Has Sobriety discovered the nasty, mendacious guy who’s always snitching on her at her AA sponsor? And is Dawn less important to the party than her friend Coleman, who he might have to fight for the world championship?
It’s hard to say. The film doesn’t really let the various emotional crises and questions replace the importance of fighting so much, and the fight itself isn’t remade or transformed into a drama. Even the big Kerr-Coleman face-off climax doesn’t make it entirely clear whether Kerr has somehow chosen his girlfriend over his friend and his sport. The film doesn’t achieve 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 give it big set pieces like a boxing movie, with scenes of the night before a fight in the locker room.
There is one moment of bravura, though, when Kerr, shocked by the loss, walks through the hallways, politely complaining to a sponsor about his opponent breaking the rules; still sweaty and in his trunks, he then takes the elevator down one floor, 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 wish the film could have promoted the brilliant blunt to equal status in drama.
