Review: The Iron Claw

The Iron Claw

Trailer

World class

In the world of Texan professional wrestling of the 1980s, one family reigns supreme: the legendary Von Erichs. Father Fritz (Holt McCallany) instils in his sons – devoted Kevin (Zac Efron), upcoming David (Harris Dickinson), would-be Olympian Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) and musically minded Mike (Stanley Simons) – a fervour for the business and for gaining the kind of success he was never able to achieve, no matter what it takes. Kevin does whatever he can to fulfil his father’s wishes, despite also trying to forge his own life an family with Pam (Lily James), but can only do so much in the face of the unrelenting tragedy so many lay at the feet of the “Von Erich curse”.

It is perhaps apropos that this film comes out now, at a time of truly seismic change in the top levels of professional wrestling. The belated fall of Vince McMahon will undoubtedly be a net positive for the industry, but in the moment calls to mind the kind of problems that have often seemed endemic: warped power dynamics at the top, over-excess outside of the ring and a litany of ruined lives left in the wake of those brief moments of glory. The Iron Claw exhibits all of these in a story whose depth of grief is so acute that it is actually understandable that director Sean Durkin choose to edit out one substantial part of that tragedy, because it would all have been just too much. But it is also a story of hope, of change and of healing, and it’s undoubtedly going to go down as one of the best, if not the best, film of 2024.

This is a film about a group of brothers, and it’s rare that you will ever see such a production that so expertly catches the intimacy of that dynamic, of four men who come together with a deep and unyielding personal bond forged by an essentially abusive parent and a common goal to be the best at one particular thing. Through a multitude of subtle moments of simple characterisation – something as basic as the brothers line-dancing together at a wedding does wonders – The Iron Claw impresses upon you how vital this bond was, and how it magnified every resulting tragedy and setback even more. Each of the brothers is their own character for sure, with any one of them worthy of some kind of singular focus, but the beating heart of this film, in all of its portrayals of triumph, in all of its many valleys of sadness, is in the way that it manages to get across to the viewer how much these four men loved each other.

When Kevin tells Pam early on that his goal in life is to “be with my brothers” it might sound twee, but then The Iron Claw does the hard work to make us fully understand, in repeated instances where the filial affection in this group is achingly obvious. To take just one example, Mike is the musical one of the group, still obsessed with wrestling, but with a mind more for his “quartet” garage band. He gets the chance to perform a paying gig at a college party, but his parents, especially his mother, are resolutely against this. It’s his brothers who stand up for him, who attempt to make the case and who then sneak out of the house at night to drive him to the gig, where they stay and cheer him on. It’s made plain that it is not an act of reckless teenage rebellion, and that attendance at the college party is just a by product: the brothers do this because they want Mike to have his moment to shine, because they love him and appreciate what he is able to do with a guitar. The Iron Claw is absolutely full of these moments, each and every one a cinematic tour de force.

You have Kevin, one of the most good-natured and inherently likable protagonists I have seen in a while, a man whose inability to marry his self-ascribed devotion to his father with his protectiveness of his brothers drives him to despair, even as his bashfulness with Pam and desperate desire to be a better father than his was to him make you fall in love with him a little yourself. You have David, perhaps better on the mike than he is a wrestler, and perhaps the most easily manipulated by his belt-obsessed father, willing to push himself to the breaking point for a dream that was never really his. You have Kerry, whose dreams of the Olympics are dashed by the US boycott in 1980, and whose slow-burn flameout compromises perhaps the most tragic throughline of the 130 minutes that we get. You have Mike (who seems to take in elements of the unseen brother, Chris), caught between wanting to be his own man through music, but he too as liable to get sucked into the vortex of wrestling, with such terrible results. I’m not kidding when I say that any of these guys could have been the focus of their own movie, which is to say nothing of the shadow of the father, whose obsession drives him to treat his son’s so terribly.

Fritz might already be the villainous character of the year, but The Iron Claw does as hard work with him as it does with the other members of the Von Erich family. He’s not just a bullying patriarch, there’s a wealth of backstory imparted to explain just why he is such a bullying patriarch, a megalomaniac who openly ranks his sons in terms of who his favourites are and coldly determines who will and who won’t get opportunities in the wrestling ring, living through them as much as he can. This is a man who has seen opportunities denied to him, and who reacts to that frustration y attempting to play puppetmaster with his sons, toying with their own dreams and expectations as he see’s fit, and always framing them in such a way as it suits him. As Kevin puts it early on, “Mom tried to protect us with God. Pop tried to protect us with wrestling”. In a wonderful moment of subtle characterisation, we learn at one point that this tough, non-nonsense Texan stereotype who advises his sons to never cry at funerals once had a college scholarship over his ability to play the clarinet, but abandoned the instrument to play football, and then abandoned that to wrestle, instantly painting that picture of someone so zero-focused in on one thing that it comes as a detriment to the idea of being more well-rounded: Fritz had no time for artistic pursuits, not when the chance of being NWA Worlds Heavyweight Champion was there, and later there for his sons. So over-riding is her personality, that his wife )a decent Maura Tierney, whose understatedness is critical to the character) has become just another victim, retreating from the emotional lives of her sons, refusing to get involved even when Kevin pleads with her to try and stop the bullying. Fritz takes no responsibility for the negative outcome of his meddling, he only finds a way to foist it on his sons when it occurs: he is the very picture, definition-perfect, of toxic masculinity.

I struggled a little bit with finding the point of the film, but in the end I feel it is very much about finding a way to combat and/or escape that toxic masculinity, and everything that it infects, and once you look at it through that lens The Iron Claw becomes almost must-see art, the sort of film that every 13-year-old kid, and especially male kids, should be required to watch as a cautionary tale. Kevin is such a better person than his father that he isn’t even capable of realising that Fritz does not really have his interest at heart until it is far too late, choosing instead to place faith in the idea of a Von Erich curse, as insane an idea as that sounds. It’s such throughlines that sustain the film through its dark second half, as the tragedies pile onto tragedies, and the whole thing becomes more than little like the 30 Rock satire Hard To Watch, a story of just trying to survive. In different hands and with a different cast this aspect of The Iron Claw could easily have made it into a disaster of a film, weighed down by the need to inflict on the audience grisly and morbid details of the successive events that destroyed the Von Erich family bit-by-bit. But for each and every one there is that subtle exploration of how toxic masculinity, through Fritz, is at the heart of it all. Whether he is blandly advising Kevin to ignore injuries, pushing David to travel to the other ends of the Earth in pursuit of goals that are not really his, dismissing the deep and obvious inner pain being felt by Kerry or treating Mike like a problem to be solved, it comes up again and again. Overcoming that toxicity, the real Von Erich curse, lies at the heart of the central journey of The Iron Claw, and while it gets plenty dark on that journey, there is some hope at the end.

Two consecutive endings scenes, that I will do everything in my power to not spoil even as I comment on them, are what really make The Iron Claw the gut-wrenching experience that it is. The first could easily have been a serious miscue, a fantastical look into something that could be a direct attempt to represent an expression of faith or could just all be imagination. But in its simple depiction of the power of brotherhood to reach out past the physical and into something else, it instead manages to create a supremely powerful moment of relief and catharsis. The second provides the emotional capstone for the entire project, a rejection of Fritz’s toxicity that points the way towards a future of hope, new generations and a legacy of love and respect, with one line in particular, out of the mouth of babes, that will be sure to get even the most stone-hearted person going. No standing ovations at the end here, just characters growing a bit and learning how to survive. I don’t usual comment on ending scenes in this kind of manner, but I just had to in this case: in turning The Iron Claw from the most intense kind of tragedy and back to something more optimistic, Durkin does a stellar job.

But he would be nowhere without this cast. Efron is an absolute revelation here. Not that he has been some kind of has-been or C-list actor before now, but it is fair to say he has largely been defined as a cute boy-next-door type on foot of the High School Musical franchise. But his performance here is very different, and really is one of the ages. Kevin Von Erich could easily be some kind of doe-eyed simpleton in the right hands, but Efron utterly nails it to take the character into different territory, a place where he is able to mix and match hopes of a great wrestling career and being a shining light for his family with fears of being second best, of letting down his father, of the family curse. His back and forth with James – understated like Tierney, but this just isn’t the story of Pam – is a real delight in the film, a lived-in feeling love story with twists and turns that seem real rather than overwrought. The love for his brothers is pouring out of his face with every interaction. And his physicality – that body work is impressive all of its own accord, the veins almost bursting out of his arms – is a major component of the wrestling scenes working as well as they do. It’s an outstanding lead showing, one that surely must push Efron now into the realm of top tier dramatic actors.

The men behind the brothers are all excellent in their own turn. Dickinson portrays David’s hidden yearning for his own greatness really well and Simons as Mike brings that aching sense of teenage frustration and slight disillusionment. But it’s White who is perhaps the best of the supporting cast, with his Kerry called upon to bring out the full range of toxic emotion as a result of years of physical and emotional harm and self-harm, and does it brilliantly. Of course he has The Bear and a rather similar character there to fall back on in terms of inspiration, but his David is a masterpiece of repressed anger and depression all of its own. McCallany also deserves serious kudos as the awful Fritz, who does so much to make the audience firmly buy into his irredeemability. If there is any criticism to make on the acting side of things it is only with Aaron Dean Eisenberg, who appears late-on as kayfabe villain Ric Flair in a crucial sequence, but whose impression of the Nature Boy is so lame it seems like he was told to act like a completely different person.

Durkin directs an excellent looking production. There are all kinds of great moments and sequences to talk about here: an opening homage to Raging Bull that segways from simulated violence to Fritz’s first demonstration of his warped outlook on life; a wonderful flowing amalgamation of shots that details the genesis of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” becoming the Von Erich’s signature theme; an almost one-shotter approach to critical wrestling matches in Kevin’s career; and a perverse glimpse at how rabid fandom for the Von Erichs operates in times of mourning. The soft, warm, lived-in home and ranch of the family gradually becomes a colder and less welcoming place as the film goes by, through the introductions of shadows and staticity where once was light and constant movement. And the manufactured orange light of the wrestling ring changes into the harsh fluorescence of backstage reality with ease, jarring the viewer deliberatly in the contrast. It all points to a well thought out production, one that does immense credit to Durkin and his team.

The wrestling moments deserve some attention all of their own. Wrestling isn’t really that important of an element here – the story of The Iron Claw could be told in any high-pressure industry really – but Durkin is able to capture much of the magic in a way that easily calls to mind the likes of The Wrestler or, to expand things out a bit, the Creed franchise. The Sportatorium of the 1980s and 1990s is the kind of legendary arena that will never be replicated now, and the viewer gets sucked into that experience, of this dark and dirty hall that you can almost smell, packed full of rabid fans paying cash at the door, watching these performance of ridiculous bad guys facing up against heroic archetypes, who gush out those over-the-top backstage promos, all willing to put their bodies on the line to tell a good story, while the backstage shenanigans play out in dank dressing rooms and shadowy head offices. Whatever Jim Cornette says, we’re never going back to the territory days when the National Wrestling Alliance was King, which makes this view of that murky past all the more entrancing, a time when regional politics was even more acute of an issue in determining who the top stars were, and when the disparity between the product that people saw and the reality behind the scenes was arguably even greater than what we see today. But we always have that in-ring product, and The Iron Claw will be enough for even the most lapsed wrestling fan to remember just why they love this art so much, through these expertly crafted trips around the ring itself, where the cast members demonstrate a willingness to throw themselves into that 1980s style with gusto. The Iron Claw gets the depiction of good wrestling, but it also gets the depiction of bad wrestling, like with those characters who are pushed into the ring too fast and without the required know-how, with terrible results.

I also want to take a brief moment to mention music. Richard Reed Parry’s score is nothing to write home too much about, this isn’t a story that really needs one, and the soundtrack choices are appropriate even if sometimes a bit Gunn-esque (insofar as they seem to have bee picked less because they it the scene and more because they fit the general aesthetic Durkin was going for, like “Don’t Fear The Reaper” appearing in an early Sportatorium scene. But there is one massive exception, which is the use of Little Scream and Parry’s “Live That Way Forever”, a song that appears twice in the film’s running time, the first as an intrinsic part of a key plot point, and later again towards the conclusion. It’s a song that really sounds like it is from the era, whose message resonates really deeply with some of the key themes. If I rarely comment on song choice in films nowadays, this is one instance when I want to give that deep dive some praise.

I saw The Iron Claw in a small cinema screen, maybe about 50 people, and aside from the few people blubbering loudly at the conclusion there were certainly plenty of dewy eyes. I just about managed to hold it together, my fiancée did so until she got home. I think I can count the amount of films I have seen garner such a reaction on one hand, but The Iron Claw joins that list, its emotional power and devastating narrative a one-two punch that will leave you pretty much floored. But this is not misery porn designed to bait awards shows, this is a well-shot, excellently scripted and phenomenally acted film, that marries an in-depth examination of toxic masculinity with a message of freeing yourself from the weight of tragedy. It’s a damn fine film about the wrestling industry too, in a time when we need reminders of the historical and current problems with that industry. More than anything it is a fine tribute to the Von Erich brothers and the legacy they built and left for their sport, their families and their fans. World class was right. Highly recommended.

(All images are copyright of Lionsgate).