Movie Review: The Iron Claw
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
The outcomes in wrestling might be staged, but the pain is very real. Pro wrestlers grapple, smash, and slam each other around for our amusement, and several documentaries and features already consider the long-term physical and emotional effects of life in the ring. But Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw might be the best of them, a heartbreaking true story about one of the sport’s biggest dynasties and the curse they sought to climb out from under.
The film begins with Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) in the ring, delivering his famous finishing move – from which the film gets its name – to an opponent as his fans cheer him on. But the majority of the film follows him in his career as a promoter in Texas, where his true iron grip is on his sons, each of whom he trains and berates in order to help them secure what he could not – a world heavyweight title. And while his boys are close in and out of the ring and ultimately create one of wrestling’s most iconic families, the pursuit of success leads to heartbreak and tragedy that will load the family with what came to be known as “the Von Erich curse.”
The film centers its focus on Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron), one of four brothers destined to enter the ring. As the film opens, Kevin is the one on whom Fritz puts all his hopes, believing his son will one day take the Von Erich name outside of Texas to compete in the nation’s biggest arenas. But when Kevin fails to impress during a bout against Ric Flair, Fritz turns his sights on his other sons, Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson), and Mike (Stanley Simons). As the brothers form an intimidating dynasty in the ring, vices and pressures outside of it lead to tragedy on such a heartbreaking scale that the first thing I did when I finished watching the film was Google the Von Erich family to see how much was true (it turns out, it could have been even worse; there was a fifth brother, Chris, omitted from the film entirely, whose fate was similar to many of his brothers).
It’s heavy material, but for Durkin, it’s an obvious labor of love.The director lavishes attention on the wrestling scenes, acknowledging that the final results were often known beforehand but also taking great care to remind audiences that the physicality in the ring was all very real. With the mounting tragedies throughout the film, it could risk feeling episodic, but the emotion propelling the film makes the accumulation of heartbreak feel inevitable, the Von Erich Curse feeling like a tangible entity weaving its way through the characters’ lives.
Since his debut as a Disney Channel heartthrob, Efron has done respectable work carving out a niche for himself as a likable performer in comedies like Neighbors and the occasional musical, like The Greatest Showman. Kevin Von Erich is his meatiest role yet, in more ways than one. Bulked up to heavyweight size, the actor is nearly unrecognizable when he steps into the ring. But the role is more than a physical transformation; Efron has a sincerity and heart that makes Kevin the emotional anchor of the film, and the actor is quite good in the back stretches where Kevin searches for something to cling to other than his father’s wrestling and his mother’s religion.
Zac Efron in “The Iron Claw.” © House Claw LLC.
At just over two hours, the film sometimes shortchanges aspects of its story; this most noticeably limits the film’s female characters, including LIly James as Kevin’s wife and Maura Tierney as the family’s matriarch, both of whom are ably performed but underwritten. And outside of Kevin, the other brothers don’t have much time to be developed into characters of great depth, but strong performances from White, Simons, and Dickinson create a strong family dynamic that ensures the emotion hits hard as the family falls apart. It’s a case where the material might have ideally been better served as a television series, but then again, the amount of tragedy might have felt more repetitive when stretched out over six or seven episodes.
Looming behind everything is Fritz Von Erich, and McCallany gives a complex performance as the family patriarch. He’s not an out and out monster – there’s genuine love and affection between him and his children. But McCallany lets the resentments and frustrations seep through his character and create a man whose own bitterness cost him everything. McCallany has been giving strong performances on the periphery for decades, but this might be his strongest film work.
As a child in the 1980s, wrestling was one of my favorite things. But I have to admit that as I grew older, it turned into a joke and something I lost interest in. The Iron Claw’s greatest success is that it takes a sport often mocked for its fakery and deception and locates the very real pain and heartache under its facade. It’s an emotional piledriver.
