It was bound to happen eventually: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has gotten serious. From roughly 2015 through sometime after COVID-19 hit, Johnson was arguably the biggest movie star in the world, and the biggest movie star in the world usually starts to hunger for more awards-y attention due to one of two things: Either said star feels that they have no further blockbusters left to conquer and can turn their attention toward prestige, or said star gets burned out on enough critical and/or box office bombs in a row that they rethink their money-driven strategy.

Weirdly, Johnson seems to have experienced both at once. In the back half of the 2010s, he was so golden that he could flex his box office muscle in a couple of top-tier franchises, one he was added to (Fast & Furious, where he’s starred in the four highest-grossing installments) and one he helped reboot (Jumanji); anchor one-off movies with mockbuster-level chintziness made into events by his presence (Rampage; San Andreas); and use that presence for more comic-skewing adventures, too (Central Intelligence; even Disney’s Moana probably owes him a substantial chunk of its success). During this period, even his occasional disappointments like Skyscraper and Baywatch would grab more eyeballs than they likely would have otherwise, the true mark of a movie star. (Without The Rock, Skyscraper doesn’t even play theaters.) But over the last few years, several of Johnson’s movies, like Black Adam and Jungle Cruise, have done well enough in raw numbers while also furthering his reputation as a content-churner without much quality control. Black Adam’s attempted takeover of the DC movies (and its subsequent assistance with tanking the whole enterprise) really did alter the power dynamics, as promised; it somehow turned one of his biggest-grossing movies, one without a single big-name co-star, into a warning flag.

The Smashing Machine, then, is here to send a very different signal from “The Rock is hustling through brand partnerships all over the globe!” or “DC Comics movies randomly belong to The Rock now!” It does, however, share some messaging with Johnson’s Cinema du Crap that preceded it, albeit in a way that’s more direct part of the text: Dwayne Johnson simply cannot lose. Here, it’s part of his character’s pathology. He plays real-life mixed martial artist Mark Kerr, a late ’90s staple of the then-nascent Ultimate Fighting scene, in a film directed by Benny Safdie, one half of the filmmaking brothers who previously mussed up the images of Adam Sandler (Uncut Gems) and Robert Pattinson (Good Time).

Johnson has clearly made himself available to Safdie, submitting to his distinctive style: grainy 16mm cinematography (paradoxically but effectively blown up to IMAX size on some screens), handheld documentary-style camerawork, and an aversion to traditional biopic rhythms. He also alters his look, that classic Oscar strategy; makeup makes him resemble Josh Brolin playing a particularly vivid rendering of the Hulk.

The Smashing Machine does its best to observe Mark in his natural habitats, through various fights and injuries – in the ring, and a home with his wife Dawn (Emily Blunt). Playing with a contrast Johnson has employed in comedies like Central Intelligence, Mark often affects a polite, soft-spoken manner despite his fearsome strength. In the ring, he has to hurt the other guy before the other guy hurts him, as he explains at one point, but he tries his best not to take it personally. He simply has to win, a quasi-Zen philosophy that doesn’t take into account the fact that he could ever lose in this relatively new arena. When he finally does, around the movie’s midway point, he doesn’t explode with rage; it’s almost scarier, the quiet firmness with which Mark insists that his opponent violated the rules and should have the victory struck down.

It’s a good performance from Johnson, teasing out the sad boyishness of this hulking self-styled superman. Mark and Dawn bring out the bickering children in each other; at first, you sense his self-involved self-management when he gently corrects the smoothie recipe she’s gotten wrong. Later, when he’s recovering from opioid addiction, he lords his struggle over her, and she acts out with petulance. Johnson and Blunt going from Jungle Cruise to this is sort of a dirtbaggier version of Leo and Kate moving from Titanic to Revolutionary Road.

Maybe that’s classist; then again, past Safdie degenerates had a little more dimension, despite being entirely fictional. The Smashing Machine leans hard on Johnson, and I love a star text as much as anyone – probably more than most – yet I struggled with the limitations of this one. The movie ultimately doesn’t have a lot of insight into Mark Kerr apart from how he relates to the famous persona of the man playing him. The urgency of past Safdie movies dissipates, maybe by design; without it, though, and unmoored from a traditional sports-story structure, we’re left to wonder what, exactly, the significance of these scenes is supposed to be, and long for someone to exert an actual point of view onto this weird world.

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler found a nonjudgmental poetry of sorts in the physical demands and punishments of professional wrestling, pointless as they could seem. The Smashing Machine doesn’t exactly give MMA or UFC the hard sell, but the pure violent destruction – the smashing of the title – also feels weirdly underplayed. The movie doesn’t feel ambivalent or ambiguous so much as noncommittal. That void at the center of The Smashing Machine allows Johnson to take it over and make it feel like it exists mainly as an awards vehicle. In other words, it’s not so different from any number of other Johnson projects, which often feel like branding opportunities more than organic motion pictures.

To be fair, he’s quite good in a lot of those, too, in terms of doing what the movie asks of him, lending them his cartoon physicality and Teflon charm. This more serious turn emphasizes that this guy can probably do whatever he sets his mind to; that’s part of his movie-star athleticism. (He was a good multiple-time SNL host, which feels like a tell as far as modern multihyphenates go.) That dexterity also makes him feel a bit like he’s running plays. An oddity like Southland Tales, his pre-superstardom attempt at something different, gave him a less substantial character in a lot of ways, but it also felt more liberated, even back before his branding had calcified. The Smashing Machine lets a few cracks form on the outer reaches of Johnson’s image, but they’re mostly cosmetic. Good as he is, you can see the calculation as he pivots.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.