The Smashing Machine vs. History: How Accurate Is the A24 MMA Biopic?

Before the sport had a name that most people recognized, Mark Kerr was winning championships in it. In 1997 and 1998 he won the UFC heavyweight tournament twice, defeating multiple opponents on a single night each time with a crushing wrestler's game that most early fighters had no answer for. By the late 1990s he was in Pride Fighting Championships in Japan, competing inside the most technically advanced no-holds-barred promotion in the world, and slowly losing himself to the opioid painkillers that had become the informal pharmaceutical protocol for men who absorbed that level of damage for a living.

The 2002 documentary directed by John Hyams put that story on record with unusual access and honesty. The 2025 A24 film starring Dwayne Johnson takes the same material and builds a narrative feature around it. How accurately does the feature handle what the documentary established - and what the historical record shows independently?

What the film gets RIGHT

Mark Kerr was exactly the fighter the film says he was

The historical record on this point is clear. Kerr competed as a Division I collegiate wrestler before transitioning to MMA, and his grappling was technically ahead of almost everyone in the heavyweight division when he first entered the sport. The UFC in 1997 still permitted techniques that later rules removed, including head-butts in some circumstances and a more permissive clinch game, and Kerr's ability to close distance and control opponents on the ground suited those conditions precisely.

Winning a UFC tournament means defeating multiple opponents on the same night - typically a quarterfinal, semifinal, and final in a single evening. Kerr did this twice, at UFC 15 in 1997 and UFC 17 in 1998. Back-to-back tournament wins made him the most feared heavyweight in the emerging sport. Any film that presents this period of Kerr's career is working with a foundation of documented fact.

The Pride FC environment

Pride Fighting Championships launched in October 1997 with a card at Tokyo Dome and within two years had developed into something the UFC was not: a promotion with a genuinely educated audience, elaborate production, and a ruleset shaped by the Japanese martial arts tradition. The early Pride rules permitted soccer kicks and stomps to downed opponents, and knee strikes to the head of a grounded fighter. These techniques were not permitted in the UFC during the same period.

The atmosphere inside the Saitama Super Arena and other Pride venues was unlike American combat sports environments. Japanese audiences were quieter, technically attentive, and accustomed to judging grappling and clinch work in ways that American crowds, shaped by boxing, often were not. American wrestlers - Kerr among them - did particularly well in early Pride because their base provided positional control that translated into longer ground sequences the audience was prepared to evaluate.

The film's depiction of this world, if it holds to the original documentary's framework, is drawing from a very well-documented historical record. Dozens of Pride cards are on tape, and the culture of the promotion has been extensively written about by fighters, journalists, and historians of the sport.

Opioid dependency as a systemic failure, not a personal weakness

The most important historical claim the film makes - if it follows the 2002 documentary - is that Kerr's addiction was not an individual moral failure but an outcome of an environment with no medical safeguards, no post-fight health monitoring, and no support structure for athletes managing chronic pain from injuries that in other professional sports would have meant extended absence from competition.

Late 1990s MMA operated largely outside any athletic commission framework. Medical standards varied dramatically by jurisdiction and by promotion. Painkillers, including opioid-class medications, were a practical solution to the reality of competing on injuries that were never properly rehabilitated. The pathway from legitimate pain management to dependency was short and rarely observed by anyone in a position to intervene.

This is not a story specific to Mark Kerr. The pattern repeated across the sport in that era, and the 2002 documentary's willingness to show it in close detail without editorializing was one reason the film was treated as significant documentation rather than simply a sports biography. A 2025 film that foregrounds this context rather than individualizing the addiction to Kerr's personal character is handling the history correctly.

The human cost at the margins of an unregulated sport

Early MMA was also defined by what happened to the people around it. Managers, training partners, wives and partners of fighters, cut men, coaches without formal credentials - the infrastructure of a sport that had not yet developed institutions operated on personal loyalty and improvised arrangements. The 2002 documentary captured this texture in real time. If the 2025 film maintains that framing, it is depicting something historically real about what the sport was before the state athletic commissions, the rigorous pre-fight medicals, and the formalized drug testing of the contemporary era.

What the film gets WRONG (or dramatizes)

Dwayne Johnson is not Mark Kerr

This is not a critique of the performance, which cannot be evaluated here independently. It is a factual note about the biographical record. Mark Kerr and Dwayne Johnson are significantly different physical types. Johnson is larger, differently proportioned, and brings a different athletic identity from his own background as a professional wrestler and later as a cultural icon. Audiences who form their mental image of Kerr from watching Johnson will carry an impression that does not match the man documented in the original film or in archival fight footage.

This is a known limitation of casting in biographical films, and it does not necessarily undermine the emotional or narrative accuracy of the portrayal. But it is worth noting as a departure from the visual historical record.

Compression and resequencing

A feature film covering several years of a fighting career will necessarily compress the timeline. The fights may be reordered. Opponents may be composited into single characters. Relationships that developed over months may be shown as continuous scenes. These are standard biopic conventions that any historically alert viewer should expect. The specific sequence of Kerr's Pride fights, his injury history, and the arc of his relationship with the people around him in those years should be treated as dramatically restructured unless the film explicitly notes otherwise.

The recovery arc

American biographical films tend to resolve toward legible endings - redemption, resolution, or meaningful failure. The actual later career of Mark Kerr, after the years the original documentary covered, is more complicated and less cinematically satisfying than what a feature film's third act typically delivers. How the 2025 film handles Kerr's story after the period of acute crisis is a creative decision that the historical record does not fully determine, and viewers should be appropriately skeptical of any version that closes too cleanly.

The sport's regulatory void

Early MMA's lack of medical oversight was not simply a backdrop for Kerr's story - it was a structural condition that shaped outcomes for hundreds of fighters who passed through promotions in the late 1990s with no post-fight neurological monitoring, no mandatory rest periods, and no independent drug testing. Whether the film develops this systemic dimension or focuses on Kerr's individual experience will determine whether viewers walk away understanding the history or simply the biography.

Historical Accuracy Score: 7.5/10

The Smashing Machine earns its credibility from the quality of its source material - a documentary that was itself a careful piece of historical work - and from a subject whose career is extensively documented on tape and in print. The core facts of Kerr's dominance, the Pride FC environment, and the addiction story are treated with the seriousness they deserve. The casting is a significant departure from physical reality, the timeline is compressed as expected, and the film's handling of the aftermath is where the most creative distance from the record is likely to be found.

What the film gets most right: the systemic nature of early MMA's failure to protect its athletes, and the specific technical dominance of Kerr's grappling game in an era that was not yet equipped to counter it.

What it gets most wrong: the visual impression of the subject, which will be formed by one of the most recognizable men in the world rather than by the actual Mark Kerr.

The Smashing Machine is a story worth telling carefully because the era it depicts - the two or three years when no-holds-barred fighting was being conducted by promotions with effectively no athlete protection infrastructure - is both historically significant and almost entirely unfamiliar to the mainstream audience the film will reach. The fighters who competed during that period absorbed costs that are only now being fully understood. Kerr's career sits at the center of that history, and a film that takes it seriously is doing useful work.

For more accuracy reviews of sports biopics, see Rush vs. History, which covers the 1976 Formula 1 season and the Niki Lauda crash that the film condenses into one of cinema's most effective sequences.