Vinny Pazienza (Miles Teller) gets pumped for a fight with help from coach Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart) in Bleed For This. (Photo courtesy of Open Road Films)

The problems with the boxing drama Bleed For This start at the top—despite massive physical bulk, Miles Teller does not make a convincing world-champion fighter. His pouty features and shaky New Jersey Italian accent constantly feel labored and mannered. Most of what’s behind is eyes is coming from Teller the actor, not the character he plays.

In last year’s revealing Esquire profile, Teller came across as a petty narcissist, an exaggeration of the character he played in the 2014 music drama Whiplash. The same qualities are evident in the performance itself, and even the choice of role. You can feel Teller trying to convince you that he worked really hard to become this character, but it’s hard to see past the artifice.

The same is true of Bleed For This, a passable but generic drama that runs through a familiar set of beats without much gusto. Written and directed by Ben Younger, (the rom-com flop Prime), the movie’s every plot point is obvious half an hour before it arrives, and the movie also doesn’t take much pleasure in its familiar trajectory. The whole thing feels simultaneously rushed and protracted.

Teller plays real-life boxer Vinny Pazienza, known as “the Pazmanian Devil” in the ring. He’s a fierce fighter until a freak accident puts him in a neck brace and seemingly ends his career. With the help of good-hearted coach Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart), his bickering family and a couple of thinly drawn love interests, Vinny gradually musters up the courage to resume training.

Younger wrings a few moments of breathtaking drama, particularly when the sound drops out unexpectedly at moments of peak tension. But the soundtrack is too prominent, and the dialogue too perfunctory, for much of the interpersonal drama to land. Contrast the purportedly emotional scenes here with similar ones in last year’s Creed, and Bleed For This looks even shoddier by comparison. That movie, from writer-director Ryan Coogler, felt entrenched in a real place and grounded in believable emotions, but this never reaches the same authenticity.

The performances here are fine but largely unremarkable — Katey Sagal does a so-so Carmela Soprano impression as Vinny’s mother Louise, and Ciaran Hinds breaks out a convincing patriarchal spirit as her husband Angelo, an initial backer of Vinny’s boxing career whose feet grow cold after his son’s brush with death. Meanwhile, I’m hard-pressed to remember names or notable features of the two actresses who play Vinny’s girlfriends, which says more about the script’s priorities than their work.

The movie’s most unexpected triumph, is the casting of Aaron Eckhart. In that Esquire profile, Teller describes his co-star as “my trainer, the overweight, kind of supporting character actor,” in contrast to Eckhart’s days as a leading man or prominent villain. But Teller’s description could also be construed as a compliment — in Bleed For This, he’s freed from expectations, and he goes for broke, pulling off what could have been a gimmicky transformation and injecting a rich inner life into an archetypal role. He runs away with the movie, which can’t keep up.

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Bleed For This
Directed by Ben Younger
Written by Ben Younger
With Miles Teller, Aaron Eckhart, Ciaran Hinds
Rated R for language, sexuality/nudity and some accident images
117 minutes
Opens today at a theater near you