You’ve seen sports movies, you’ve seen biopics, and you’ve seen award season dramas, but The Smashing Machine aims to give you all of those things together while not falling into the cliches of any of them. Does the film pull it off? Yes and no. 

Dwayne Johnson stars as mixed martial arts fighter and early UFC pioneer Mark Kerr. Mark is focused, polite, and friendly, despite choosing a career where he beats people to a pulp in the ring. He lives with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), who is sometimes his biggest supporter and sometimes his most powerful trigger. 

Much like a typical biopic, we see a period of Mark’s life as he trains, wins, develops a drug dependency, loses, and picks himself back up again. It’s a familiar tale, but The Smashing Machine doesn’t go for the overt melodrama of your usual biopic. 

At several points in the story, we expect an enhanced made-for-cinema-screens moment: horrifying domestic violence, a nearly-deadly drug overdose, a crippling injury—something to give us that heightened movie reality we so often see in films about legendary real people. The Smashing Machine comes close to these things, but instead focuses more on giving us a grounded story. 

This feels more real and less exaggerated, which can be great in its perceived authenticity, but can also make the film feel drawn out and occasionally a bit boring. 

Mark begins the film as a nice guy, remains a nice guy as he’s gaining fame and notoriety, continues to be a nice guy as he deals with addiction and rehab, and then concludes as, you guessed it, a nice guy. Aside from a few heated moments in his toxic relationship or struggles with not being the absolute best at all times, he doesn’t go through a major character transformation.

A lot has been made of Johnson branching out of his typical celebrity-driven blockbusters to take on more serious fare with this Benny Safdie-directed award season biopic. While he’s physically enormous, Mark is much more subdued and thoughtful when compared to the arrogant and exaggerated characters we usually think of when a movie stars The Rock. But because Mark’s journey doesn’t really seem to shape him or cause him to undergo a major character transformation, the role feels a bit safe. Yes, Johnson is good, but it can sometimes feel like baby’s first A24 movie because the challenge is more in the muscle tone and facial prosthetics than it is in the acting.

Blunt, on the other hand, completely disappears into the role of Dawn. She’s a character who can be incredibly loving and supportive one minute, but then turn on a dime and cause a blowout fight. The relationship between Dawn and Mark felt very authentic to those couples who know exactly how to push each other’s buttons, and Blunt does an amazing job conveying those mood swings with her eyes and her body language in addition to the tone in her delivery. 

A notable supporting role is real-life MMA fighter Ryan Bader as fellow UFC pioneer Mark Coleman. We only get glimpses into Coleman’s life—his financial motivations in winning these bloody fights, his genuine friendship with Mark, his journey to the finals—but he’s an engaging character we can instantly connect with. 

The Smashing Machine is a sports movie that doesn’t want to do the tropes of a sports movie, it’s a biopic that doesn’t want to do the tropes of a biopic, and it’s an award season movie that doesn’t want to do the tropes of an award season movie. I respect all of those motivations, but the end result lacks some of the spark needed to make this a more memorable film.