2023’s The Iron Claw delivers on so much of its promise. A fabulous cast provides impressively kinetic in-ring action within a dark family tragi-drama which hits all the right emotional notes. As a card-carrying wrestling fan, my reaction is complicated to the point that putting together a single article which contains all my thoughts on the film is next to impossible.
To solve this deadlock, the best thing I feel like I can do is to organise my thoughts into two separate lanes and essentially provide two reviews. Here’s the first (admittedly short) one, judging the film for what it is and how it will hit people who haven’t spent (wasted) months of their life watching early 80’s Texas wrestling on WWE network.
The opening sequence sets the tone for the film. It’s oddly reminiscent of the beginning of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, with classical music supporting a black and white scene of some good old flesh slapping. This comparison turns out to be apt, as it becomes apparent that the theme of toxic masculinity compliments Antichrist’s treatise on misogyny to the point that it could be shown as a companion piece.
Holt McCallany’s Fritz von Erich (or should it be Jack Adkisson who in turns plays the part of Fritz Von Erich) is a brutal man. The film suggests that the ring provides a conduit for his aggression, anger and pain. The relationship that his sons would go on to have with him and the so called Von Erich curse is the centre of the film. This family drama element is reflected in director Sean Durkin’s first feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene, which also contains a patriarch antagonist and young adults trying to deal with growing up in a cult. I’m not talking ‘patriarchal’ when Fritz is concerned. Using patriarchal as an adjective doesn’t do justice to his position of power, he simply IS a patriarch, running his family and wrestling promotion as a cult. Around the table, Fritz clearly spells out his family rankings, with Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) leading in his favour due to his status as an Olympian, followed by Kevin (Zac Efron), David (Harris Dickinson) and finally poor Mike (Stanley Simons), who apparently needs to bulk up. When this is brought up, the viewer is almost expecting this to be a joke, but it isn’t. Kevin quickly establishes himself as the protagonist, begging his mother to exert pressure on his father to go easy on Mike, who wants to be a musician. Obviously, this attempt does not work.
This internal ranking system bleeds over, or perhaps is directly contained, within the wrestling cult. Kevin is a talented wrestler, but David is entering the business and shows a remarkable amount of showmanship, which is required to drive interest in television ratings and ticket sales. Kerry’s eventual appearance in wrestling following the USA’s boycott of the 1980 Olympics leads to the Von Erich kids forming a trio and gaining megastar status across the world, and the film goes full musical biography, as the temptations on the road start to warp the mentality of our favourite brothers. Obviously, tragedy begins to strike.
Kevin reveals the existence of the family curse to his girlfriend, Pam (Lily James) on a date, and she becomes Kevin’s grounding outside of the cult of wrestling. His priorities are family and success in wrestling, most notably the World’s Heavyweight Title. Under the tight control of their father, the brothers try their best to sane and hold up under pressure in a crazy sub-culture as Mike is thrown into the fray. One by one, the curse takes away what each boy loves the most, and the viewer can’t help but root for them to break this curse and find their own way in life.
At this point, I may have reached the limit of what I can say about the film from a casual perspective without allowing my wrestling fan brain to interrupt me. The performances are excellent, the relationship between the brothers elicits genuine fondness, Fritz elicits genuine dislike, and the wrestling elicits genuine wincing. The soundtrack also deserves a mention, cracking out 80’s rock all the way through to great effect. For anyone interested in a well-played, well shot and extremely muscular family drama, I see no major way in which The Iron Claw falls short.
With that being said, a special shout-out definitely has to go out to the actor who played Ric Flair. God bless him, I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but JESUS was he a terrible Ric Flair. There was no energy, no charisma and frankly even his “woo” was uninspiring. Bruiser Brody was also a bit of a disappointment, more because of how interesting a man he was in real life and that not being reflected in the character than an issue of bad acting. Ryan Nemeth (a surprisingly talented filmmaker in himself!) does give a nice turn as Gino Hernandez. Overall, I would have loved to have seen more of the Freebirds’ feud too, as well as the inclusion of AEW megastar Maxwell Jacob Friedman as Lance, the fake Von Erich. While I can’t say that any of these omissions made the film worse, it adds up in terms of missed opportunities.
More importantly, though, Zac Efron definitely does not disappoint as Kevin, though. His naïve nature and desire to please everyone is played subtly and skilfully, as is his rage and sadness. He even got a stellar review from Kevin himself! Jeremy Allen White gives a typically charismatic performance as Kerry, although his lack of height does make it slightly mystifying that his father and the wrestling business preferred him so clearly over Kevin. The wrestling scenes were wonderfully choreographed by Chavo Guerrero and were very well shot. The fans however, let themselves down as a group of extras. They come across like modern WWE fans who almost feel like they’re too good to even be there, not hardcore 80’s wrestling fans deeply invested in the Von Erichs. Ultimately, the film does not feel like it was made by someone who truly understands wrestling, and that is a bit of a downer in terms of finding someone who can get the most out of the story when turning it into a biopic. At the very least, a wrestling fan or even someone who did a decent amount of research would have found someone who could’ve done a half decent Ric Flair impression.
For now, though, I’m afraid I have to enter The Wrestling Zone, purely to get across an honest point of view for the film. To be clear, I don’t have a problem on a sort of Star Trek fan level. It doesn’t disappoint me that events are out of date and that Chris Von Erich wasn’t included, but I do think that opportunities were missed, and the portrayal of wrestling within the film warrants discussion.
The Wrestling Zone
After watching The Iron Claw twice, I’m still not entirely sure what the film actually thinks wrestling is. It basically can’t resist the temptation of injecting reality into pro-wrestling, seemingly either ashamed or annoyed by the perceived dramatic limitations of showing pre-determined fights. This trap was avoided in Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, but was fallen into completely by Heels, the tv series. At one point, Fritz gets actively annoyed by Kevin being hurt on the floor after a vertical suplex, as if gaining sympathy for the babyface isn’t a good thing. This attitude somewhat diminishes the concept of pro-wrestling in the real world, almost suggesting there’s no value in pro-wrestling as an athletic drama in itself. This quandary is most likely the dramatic conceit a filmmaker feels they need in order to not muddy the waters in terms of realities, but a part of me feels like giving into this device de-facto disrespects the art form itself, and sadly I do find this reflected throughout the film.
Firstly, we have to address the travesty of WWE’s hegemony over the concept of professional wrestling leading to the denigration of the territorial age of wrestling. If you watch a classic Von Erichs match in Texas, the pop those guys get on their entrance and during the match is absolutely unbelievable. However, watching the Von Erichs in the film would have you believe that they’re essentially indy wrestlers struggling to survive whilst being reasonably popular on a local level. The reality is that the wrestling show was regularly doing 10.0 ratings in Texas, which is akin to saying 10% of the entire population of Texas was regularly watching World Class in its heyday. The scene of Pam approaching Kevin outside the Sportatorium is like watching a girl approach a small band outside a minor venue, which is wildly inaccurate. It’s not a problem in itself to be inaccurate, but in underestimating and under-representing the popularity of the Von Erichs, it does a disservice to Kevin’s commitment to family by getting married in the first place, as well as the sheer number of temptations available to the boys both before and after the ESPN deal made them national stars. It also comes across as quite jarring when the state of Texas essentially has a day of mourning upon the death of David.
With this in mind, you can just imagine my distaste at some of the reviews. Writing for The Athletic, David Sims commented, “To wrestling nerds, the Von Erichs have a titanic legacy, and Durkin does his best to represent that by exploring the sport’s crunchy, amateurish pre-corporate age, when regional live events were the big moneymakers and television was largely ignored.” The sad thing is I can’t blame Mr. Sims for getting this so wrong based on the impression given by the film. In reality, television was not largely ignored, it was absolutely huge. The wrestlers for World Class were not remotely ‘amateurish’, and the very use of that term fills me with indignance.
Another missed opportunity was the lack of dimensions given to Fritz in the film. In reality, Fritz was made the way he was by an absolutely abhorrent upbringing. His father would take him to garages and other locations and have him literally fight other children, where a ring of men would use their boys in the same way dogs are used in pit fighting. Kevin himself pushed back on the portrayal of his father, and states with conviction that he does not blame his father for the tragedies in his family. On Chris Jericho’s podcast, he stated: “I’ll tell you my dad was a great man. I loved him so much. He was an honourable, good man… I want everyone to know he comes off pretty rank in this movie. You would think that the pressure that Fritz put on us is why my brothers would commit suicide. I mean, why would anyone commit suicide, that is so far beyond me, but it’s drugs. Drugs did it.” Fritz is purely an antagonist, and the film fails to show that the routes of his patriarchal approach and philosophy have their roots in childhood trauma, and the line of mistreating sons goes back beyond him.
It’s also worth mentioning that Fritz Von Erich’s in-ring character was a Nazi, not just a rough nasty dude. Before the Von Erich’s legendary trios match with the Fabulous Freebirds, the Georgia trio brought out Confederate soldiers in full garb with the flag. Kevin grabbed the mic and rather than dismissing the confederacy (Texas’s relationship with the Confederacy was a much more complicated one than in Georgia), Kevin made sure to mention he had relatives who died under the Southern flag, and the Von Erichs have respect for those who gave their lives fighting for the South. There was an element of race in play when the white, blonde Von Erichs faced off against the likes of Ugandan ‘savage’ Kamala which is absent from the film.
I don’t criticise the film for using Fritz as an antagonist to tell a story about men struggling with the demands of their father, but I do criticise the film for failing to properly flesh him out, and missing the opportunity to tell a more complicated story about why Fritz himself sees a curse in his family line, and why he feels like he needs to toughen up and protect his sons. Where the film shows a bitter man trying to live vicariously through his sons to cover failings in his own career, the reality of Fritz points to a traumatised and overprotective man helplessly repeating the harm done to him by his father in a cycle of abuse, which for me is a more interesting story in itself.