Directed by Benny Safdie – Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt

A legendary MMA fighter struggles to balance rising fame with addiction, pressure, and the personal cost of a violent career.

This is being billed as Dwayne Johnson’s first “serious” role, but he’s dipped into that space before. Faster and Snitch both saw him dial the charisma way down.

But I have to agree with the consensus. This feels different.

What worked for me most is how restrained the performance is. Johnson plays Kerr as soft-spoken, polite, almost gentle — but there’s always something underneath that feels unstable. You can sense the pressure, the ego, the addiction, all sitting just below the surface. It’s a tough balance to pull off, and I think he really nails it here.

Emily Blunt is reliably strong, and some of the athletes-turned-actors are surprisingly natural. Nothing feels overly polished, which helps the world feel believable.

The film itself leans heavily on atmosphere. The score, the sound design, and the constant sense of movement all build this low-level tension that never really goes away. Even in quieter moments, there’s a feeling that something could snap.

As a biopic, I also appreciated that, for the most part, it avoids some of the usual beats. It doesn’t feel overly structured or manufactured in the way these stories sometimes do.

Where I struggled a bit is that it never fully came together as a story for me. There are all the pieces — addiction, violence, recovery, identity — but it often feels like we’re just circling them rather than moving through them.

A lot of the film is spent in the rhythm of training, fighting, and recovery, and while that may be true to the life, it left me feeling a little distant from it emotionally.

I found myself wondering if the movie is less about Kerr as an individual and more about capturing a moment in the early days of MMA — the people who built it, the toll it took, and what it demanded from them.

If that’s the goal, it makes more sense. Because the film really does show the human side of these imposing figures.

But it also might explain why it didn’t fully connect for me. I just don’t have a strong attachment to the sport, and without that, the story never quite pulled me in.

That said, the central performance is enough to carry it. Johnson really does disappear into this in a way I wasn’t expecting, and I’d like to see him take more swings like this. When he simply tones down the charm, it doesn’t always work. Here, he feels like a completely different person.

Even without fully connecting to the story, I found it worth watching for that alone.

Verdict: Good Time