The Smashing Machine: The Rock punches above his weight in flabby, nothing script

It's hard to imagine a time before MMA took over the pay-per-view channels of every bar room and dorm in North America. But it wasn't that many years ago it was on the metaphorical ropes: targeted for extermination by U.S. Sen. John McCain and attacked as barbaric even while organizations like UFC and Pride competed for ever-dwindling air time.

Into those rings walked Mark Kerr, the six-foot-three-inch, 250-plus-pound "Smashing Machine" whose favourite pastime was exerting his indomitable will upon the men foolish enough to join him in the octagon.

That's not to suggest Kerr is a violent man. Instead, the dichotomy between his insatiable bloodlust for physical dominance on the mat and his doe-eyed, soft-shoe familiarity off it is a huge part of Benny Safdie's new, similarly titled The Smashing Machine. In fact, that may be the only point the Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson-led film has to make.

Sure, there is an actual story here; documenting an oddly selected (more on that later) portion of the fighter's up-and-down career, The Smashing Machine is a subject-approved exposé on how Kerr (Johnson) lost it all, (theoretically) changed his outlook, then fought to get it all back.

In setting that journey up, we join Kerr on a high: waltzing into fights with an awe-shucks grin, before waltzing back out with glittering championship belts — holding his wife Dawn (Emily Blunt) in his arms and giving befuddling interviews to Japanese journalists outside the Japanese-set Pride fights.

One journalist has to prod him after asking him to consider how he would hypothetically handle losing a match, after he fails to actually answer the question. But it's an impossibility for Kerr: He can't fathom the concept of losing. It doesn't fit into his mind, Kerr explains, while grinning like a lobotomized King Kong. Next question?

Of course, this is a setup for a fall. Kerr's fans won't be surprised to see it: The gentle slide into general catatonia as a pain pill addiction creeps in from the sidelines. Then, it's missed matches, dwindling opportunities, hospitalizations and knock-down, drag-out fights with Dawn.

These comparisons are everywhere, shown as Kerr calmly explains the source of his battered face to a disapproving elderly woman at the doctor's office. As he sagely wheels grocery carts through busy parking lots. Or as he politely complains to referees about dangerous, banned moves performed against him, just hours after said moves were banned to make the modern-day gladiator games more palatable to wide audiences and doubting politicians.

It is this aspect of The Smashing Machine that offers the most potential narrative fodder: how a sport that initially only bothered with two rules (no biting, no eye-gouging) transformed into the semi-respectable regulated industry powerhouse of today.

If that's what you'd like to mine, then this this period in history is the most interesting one to choose. But if examining Kerr is the goal, the time period chosen to do so is, putting it mildly, an odd one.

There was an entire rags-to-riches, skyrocketing success story on offer if they'd looked earlier in his career. Or later, the Sisyphean tragedy of a once-unbeatable force of nature on a streak of losses, forced to grapple with what his life means when his only metric for meaning (forcing others into failure) is turned back around on him.

Instead, we're somewhere in the middle of both periods. This wouldn't be the worst option, if Safdie had at least tried to chip away at Kerr's facade. But like any authorized biography, the main purpose of Smashing Machine isn't to expose uncomfortable truths: it's to lightly trot out humanizing missteps, before lionizing its star as he overcomes them.

The way Safdie does so is perhaps The Smashing Machine's biggest fault. Instead of offering a cohesive story, it stumbles through a series of life events one after another: a difficult fight, a difficult addiction, a difficult recovery, a difficult relationship.

Except these don't build one into another, or build into a statement about Kerr or even the sport at its centre. Unlike virtually every other fighting story, we don't see Kerr fundamentally change his belief system; it's only the circumstances that change around him, like a rambling collage of home videos — selected at random to give the impression of indie, insightful character study.

Really, they just amount to a lacklustre portrait of a terrible marriage and struggling athlete, without anything revealing or even unique to warrant paying attention. Like Foxcatcher meets Marriage Story, except without the shooter or showtunes.

There is of course the one benefit: Johnson's nuanced turn as Kerr, showing off his first risky, rewarding acting performance since the criminally underrated Pain & Gain. But it's wasted on a nothing script, one that keeps frantically employing its sole gimmick of a hulking behemoth of a man completing chores and attending dinner parties, as if Georges St. Pierre not pummelling people to death outside of a Shoppers Drug Mart were somehow shocking enough to warrant a movie.

But there is something endlessly rewarding about the long-suffering pugilist — specifically when it comes to the Academy Awards. The role has earned acting nominations for Denzel Washington in The Hurricane, Will Smith in Ali, Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, and wins for Robert De Niro in Raging Bull and Wallace Beery all the way back in The Champ.

Even back then, the story of an aging prizefighter brought down by physical and substance abuse wasn't all that new. In a contemporaneous review, the New York Times called The Champ out as a slight story supported entirely by its performances, "one of those tried and trusted affairs that were all very well in the days of old silent pictures, but something more novel and subtle is needed now."

The Champ was released in November 1931.