The Iron Claw (2023)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
Awards-season hopeful The Iron Claw is a compelling drama of tragedy and inspiration within the world of professional wrestling.
A possible career-changing performance from Zac Efron. A strong ensemble helps, but Efron has never been better.
Fans of wrestling will be interested. Fans of family dramas will be interested. Fans of good movies should be in attendance.
NO
Skips a little too quickly and feels like a highlight reel at times - a common trait among biopics trying to tell complicated stories in a conventional two-hour structure.
Wrestling historians will possibly be super frustrated at how loose and fast The Iron Claw plays with timelines, in-ring history and the restructuring of the Von Erich family as a whole.
Trigger warning for those sensitive to the topic of suicide. The Iron Claw cannot hide from it and the film addresses it.
OUR REVIEW
Full disclosure, I am a wrestling fan.
Growing up, Saturday afternoons were spent with WTBS out of Atlanta. For me, Georgia Championship Wrestling or the eventual NWA World Championship Wrestling soundtracked my Saturday afternoons; often with my Dad in a chair next to me. As I grew up, and his interest waned, I watched wrestling with my friends and, in the 1980s, with the proliferation of syndicated television and wrestling programming becoming a rather cheap investment for local television stations, Saturday night wrestling programs was often what we did when we got together in the mid-to-late 1980s.
Most people age out of wrestling and find it absurd, if they ever watched it at all. I get that…I definitely did for a number of years. Yet, if you ask a wrestler, or “sports entertainer,” why they engage in the profession, you will hear from the men and women who perform in professional wrestling that there is no experience quite like it. The rush of the crowd, the instant response you get, the ability to emulate a fight so well that you can make people believe in you and ride the highs and lows in the storytelling you attempt to create in the ring.
As I am much older now, I find myself more interested in the creative process of wrestling than the ultimate spectacle on television. In addition, as I get older I find myself fascinated why people put themselves through such physical wear and tear. Sure, pro wrestling matches are predetermined before the combatants hit the ring - but the bumps, the injuries, and the years of quality of life at risk with every suplex, DDT, and dive is significant.
When you are a kid watching wrestling, you seldom think about what happens when the cameras turn off. In the case of the Von Erich family out of Dallas, Texas, the worst things imaginable seemed to occur when the cameras went dark and the realities of real-life became the performance that ultimately became too difficult for most of them to complete.
I mention all of this because The Iron Claw, a gripping, sobering look at one of wrestling’s most iconic families, is a tragic story of mental and physical abuse, impossible expectations and the pressure of being perfect when everyone is fallible. For family patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany), he owns, books, and performs for World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW), one of the two dozen wrestling territories which existed around the country in the 1970s, long before Vince McMahon took his World Wrestling Federation territory and made it a global iconic brand, commonly known today as WWE.
Fritz dominated WCCW as an in-ring performer for much of the 1960s and 1970s. When the movie opens, his career as a performer is winding down and he has started to turn to his sons to take WCCW into the 1980s and beyond. As director Sean Durkin’s film opens, Fritz’s son Kevin (Zac Efron) is already an in-ring talent alongside older brother David (Harris Dickinson). Younger brother Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) is preparing to compete in the 1980 Olympics as a discus thrower, and youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) is in high school, playing in a local band, and not at all interested in entering the wrestling business.
Notably, the movie leaves the youngest youngest brother Chris Von Erich out of the film entirely. If you look it up, Chris’ story is exceptionally tragic and as Durkin shares, one movie can only carry so much sadness.
Creative liberties aside, Durkin also sidesteps details on the brothers’ personal lives. Instead, he focuses on Fritz’s push of his sons to the top of the card. Ripped and attractive, the women swoon for the brothers. As they appear more frequently, ticket sales increase. As they improve their in-ring performance, other territories want in on the Von Erich brand. Fritz revamps his television program and national sports channel upstart ESPN wants a piece. By 1982, WCCW was catching fire, bringing in the current World Champion, Ric Flair, to appear and wrestle the Von Erichs in title matches. Fritz’s moves were paying off - literally and figuratively.
Behind the scenes, Fritz proves to be a relentless motivator. He ranks his favorite sons at the dinner table. His motivational speeches are problematic and increasingly focused on success and less about the care and love of his sons. Wrestling becomes the be-all and the end-all. Compliant wife Doris (Maura Tierney) observes Fritz’s borderline abusive demands, but says little. The brothers find themselves in a riptide of escalating fame and celebrity, but also never being good enough to their father-slash-coach. Kevin, good in the ring, struggles to cut a strong “promo,” the fiery, charismatic speeches that make people want to see matches at upcoming live events. David, on the other hand, oozes charisma and is more fluid in his ring ability, while Kerry, available to wrestle after President Carter boycotts the 1980 Olympic Games, takes to the wrestling trade like the proverbial fish to water.
Durkin’s camera swirls around the ring. His capturing of the physicality is brief, in bursts, but impressive to witness and he takes the unique approach of blending truth and fiction when it comes to what occurs within the ropes. Where Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler peeled the curtain back on how wrestling is created and performed, The Iron Claw allows for a bit more ambiguity.
The inevitable tragedy strikes when David dies unexpectedly on a Japanese tour in February 1984. The haunts of losing a previous son in the 1950s from an accidental electrocution makes Kevin feel like there is a Von Erich curse. He shares this with Pam (Lily James), his future wife, and she softly dismisses it as Fritz strongarms Mike to follow in the footsteps of his dead brother.
The Iron Claw gains strength from some really strong performances, including an impressive lead turn from Efron. As the last surviving Von Erich brother, the movie is presented through him and Efron embodies Kevin as a beacon of survival and determination. Efron transformed his body for the role and while far more jacked than Kevin ever was, Efron uses that armor to find resiliency in the face of everything thrown at him. Later, when Mike’s in-ring injuries result in suffering toxic shock syndrome at the hospital and eventual brain damage, Kevin is against Fritz’s demands to get Mike back in the ring.
Kerry’s personal life and struggles became well documented and increasingly hard to hide from the Dallas news media. As struggles with drugs and alcohol became well known for Kerry, somehow the family kept secret that, in the last years of his wrestling career, he wore a hidden prosthetic after suffering a lower leg amputation from a motorcycle accident in the late 1980s.
While Mike and Kerry eventually succumbed to the pressure of being a “Von Erich,” tragically dying by their own hands, Kevin remains. And to this day, as two of his sons continue in the wrestling business, he only recently has stepped back in front of the camera and embraced an industry that gave him the highest of highs and unfathomable lows.
The Iron Claw builds in sadness. It just does. This is heavy material, a heavy movie, and a weighty story of senseless tragedy. Durkin, by his own admission and Kevin’s approval, leaves so much story on the table. By the late 1980s, WCCW had crumbled into the vacancy of empty arenas, bad creative, lost syndication deals and buyers wanting to acquire whatever was left of the promotion. Before Kerry died in February 1993, he would make his way to Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation, winning the company’s secondary Intercontinental Championship. It was as good as it could get for Fritz, as he never got to hold or secure a long run with the World Heavyweight Title for himself or his boys.
(Note: Kerry did get an 18-day World title run in 1984, beating Ric Flair in Texas Stadium in May of that year, weeks after David died, before Flair ironically regained the title in Japan).
For those who believe professional wrestling is silly, absurd, and full of bombast and ridiculousness, perhaps that’s due to the Vince McMahon pivot to “sports entertainment.” For Kevin Von Erich, his dreams and desires to follow in the family business were met with initial hope and optimism, tremendous fleeting success, then parental abuse and unspeakable pain and anguish. As the iron claw tightened, he may have bled, passed out and struggled, but he survived, making The Iron Claw, ultimately, an unlikely story of inspiration.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Maura Tierney, Stanley Simons, Holt McCallany, Lily James, Michael J. Harney, Brady Pierce, Kevin Anton, Aaron Dean Eisenberg, Maxwell Jacob Friedman, Cazzey Louis Cereghino, Ryan Nemeth, Chavo Guerrero Jr.
Director: Sean Durkin
Written by: Sean Durkin
Release Date: December 22, 2023
A24