Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lisa Laman | Film | October 6, 2025
In director Benny Safdie’s original works (which he helmed with brother Josh Safdie), ordinary lives filled the frame. These two filmmakers—along with casting directors like Eleonore Hendricks—cobbled together fantastic casts of unknown faces to populate titles like Daddy Longlegs, Good Time, and Uncut Gems, among others. Even when Robert Pattinson, Kevin Garnett, and Adam Sandler started headlining Safdie Brothers films, there was still room for memorable performances from then-unknown performers like Julia Fox, Mitchell and Stewart Wenig, and Peter Verby.
Now, these two brothers have launched their own solo filmmaking careers. Benny Safdie’s debut feature-length directorial effort, divorced from Josh, is The Smashing Machine, which largely keeps the duo’s default casting style alive and well. Dwayne Johnson is this movie’s equivalent to Sandler or Pattinson, a big star surrounded by non-professional actors (in this case, faces like Ryan Bader and Bas Rutten). The other major legendary performer here, though, is Emily Blunt, playing Mark Kerr’s (Johnson) on-again-off-again girlfriend, Dawn.
The performances have been one of the strongest features of Safdie Brothers movies. Yet, Blunt, despite being such an esteemed performer, doesn’t quite click as Dawn. What happened here? Why is Emily Blunt in The Smashing Machine so underwhelming?
Blunt’s Always Been Talented In a Specific Mold
There’s an ethereal quality to Emily Blunt that’s been magnetic since her earliest days as a performer. She exudes this aura, suggesting she isn’t from our normal world. She’s channeled that into such interesting, different personas. In The Devil Wears Prada, she lent immediate believability to Emily Charlton’s rich job experience. This woman has spent so many years in the fashion industry that she’s no longer a “commoner” like Anne Hathaway’s Andy.
She lent similar levels of unblinking conviction to Edge of Tomorrow’s Rita Vrataski. Just the way Blunt walked on-screen made it obvious Vrataski’s fought every kind of alien imaginable. Do. Not. Mess. With. This. Woman. Her heightened qualities also make her perfect for live-action fairy tales like Into the Woods and especially the titular role of Mary Poppins Returns. Even in the often operatic Oppenheimer, she was remarkable at delivering some of the film’s most searing dialogue (“You don’t get to commit the sin and then all of us to feel sorry for you!”). Big Claire Foy energy there in how much fun it is watching Blunt tear down male authority figures in this Christopher Nolan directorial effort.
Not every performer can effortlessly inhabit a stylized aesthetic (hello, Gal Gadot!), so Blunt’s chops in this department are laudable. For more grounded films, though, Blunt’s always delivered hit or miss work. Stuck in reality, Blunt’s greatest acting assets are stripped away. In prior projects like The Girl on the Train, she’s also shown a tendency for excessively calculated oversized flourishes to represent extreme emotional beats. That problem comes to the forefront in The Smashing Machine.
In this exceedingly down-to-earth movie, shown in either a tank top or a tight dress and speaking in a vaguely Jersey-ish/Boston-ish accent (though the real Stride is from Ohio), Blunt is tasked with playing a working woman married to a fighter. She’s channeling the aesthetic of Heidi Gardner’s Every Boxer’s Girlfriend From Every Movie About Boxing Ever. The result is a woman too caricatured in her body language and demeanor. Her performance echoes other past movie characters (like Amy Adams in The Fighter), but lacks idiosyncrasies specific to Dawn Stride. Thus, the immediate believability Blunt brought to Edge of Tomorrow evades her here.
Emily Blunt Struggles Landing A K-O In Smashing Machine’s Argument Scenes
It doesn’t help that The Smashing Machine’s script (courtesy of Safdie) traps Blunt largely in a series of heated arguments with Kerr. In these intimate bouts, Safdie’s filmmaking and script channel John Cassavetes and Kathleen Collins (specifically Losing Ground) energy. Those filmmakers, though, knew the importance of actors who could deliver naturalistic performances effortlessly. Blunt doesn’t work in that department.
Since she always feels like a famous person dressing up as a working-class soul (see also: Joaquin Phoenix in Eddington, Glenn Close in Hillbilly Elegy), it’s difficult to buy these scenes as a window into Kerr and Stride’s most heartbreaking moments. Instead, Blunt’s performance often echoes her Girl on the Train work. There, she’d depict the terror of living with alcoholism through frustratingly cartoonish means like endlessly wiping a mirror. Echoes of that underwhelming turn are evident here, particularly in her unsatisfying line deliveries and strained depictions of Stride at her most psychologically tormented.
In all fairness to Blunt, there are external Smashing Machine elements diluting how good her performance can be. For one thing, Johnson’s not very good in these argument scenes either. It takes two to tango, and just as Blunt isn’t Gena Rowlands, Johnson’s very much not Peter Falk in Machine’s extended stabs at emulating A Woman Under the Influence. Safdie’s script is also at its worst when handling anything related to Dawn Stride. The “telling, not showing” problem often hampering this feature especially plagues this character.
At one point, Kerr bellows at Stride that she’s always “staying up with [her] friends until 4:00 AM.” The only socializing moviegoers have previously seen Stride engage in was a midday birthday rendezvous with her best buddy. This is a microcosm of how so much of Dawn Stride is kept either off-screen or undercooked. In these conditions, Blunt has only a thinly sketched whisper of a character to work with. Perhaps with a more three-dimensional role, she could’ve tapped into the same conviction underscoring her greatest performances.
Ironically, The Smashing Machine does allow one to appreciate what Emily Blunt is very adept at. If you need to be in the heightened worlds of Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, and Mary Poppins Returns, she reigns supreme. Even A Quiet Place’s dialogue-free sensibilities unlocked interesting displays from Blunt of physicality-based emotional urgency. She’s got chops as an artist, but they’re ill-served by The Smashing Machine. Blunt just never properly channels a grounded, down-to-Earth vibe as Dawn Stride. Earlier Safdie Brothers features let under-the-radar faces light up the silver screen. In this big-budget biopic, though, Blunt (and to a certain extent Johnson as well) delivers a vague simulacrum of proletariat existence whose artificiality is always tangible.
