Zac Effron puts on the true-story tights of a wrestling family dynasty
The Iron Claw
Starring Zac Efron, Jeremy Allan White & Lily James
Directed by Sean Durkin
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Dec. 22
There can be a lot going on inside a wrestling ring—villains and heels, good guys, tough girls, cartoonish personas, flamboyant feuds, deep grudges, bucketfuls of trash talk. But there’s a lot going on outside the ropes, too, in this muscular movie saga about one of wrestling’s most successful real-life family dynasties.
The Von Erichs, a Texas-based clan of brothers and their father, dominated the sport in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. But their triumphs on the mat were swamped by waves of tragedy at home. Many wrestling fans spoke of “the Von Erich curse,” a grim reaper that seemed to relentlessly stalk the family.
The Iron Claw opens with the eye-opening sight of Zac Efron, bulked up to balloon-ish proportions to portray Kevin Von Erich, the first sibling to follow the pro-wrestling footsteps of his father, whose signature wrestling “move” was a one-handed clampdown on an opponent’s face he dubbed The Iron Claw. If you ever wondered what the former star of High School Musical would look like with an ornately sculpted, Herculean body like He-Man or the Hulk, and a bowl-ish ‘70s haircut to match, well, wonder no more.
Kevin’s brothers Kerry (Jeremy Allan White, above, from TV’s The Bear), David (Harris Dickenson, now starring in the FX series A Murder at the End of The World) and Mike (Stanley Simmons) also become wrestlers, working to develop their father’s Iron Claw “finishing touch,” the unbreakable grip that almost always led to a quick end to a match.
We learn that the family’s firstborn, Jack Jr., died by drowning at the age of 6; he’s absent throughout most of the movie, but we meet him briefly in an ethereal “afterlife” scene. (The movie does not portray or mention at all another brother, Chris, who took his own life with a handgun in 1991.) But by 1993, five of the six brothers were dead, succumbing to suicide, drug overdose or disease. It’s a Greek tragedy written in spandex, served with a Texas twang.
Holt McCallany, who played FBI agent Bill Tench on TV’s Mindhunter, is terrifyingly good as the Von Erich patriarch, Fritz, who also rules with an Iron Claw at home. The Affair’s Maura Tierney is his stoic, God-fearing wife, Doris, saying goodbye to her sons one by one. Lily James loses all traces of her proper British accent as Pam, the Texas belle who becomes Kevin’s wife, trying to calm his worries that he will pass on the dreaded family “curse” to their children.
It’s a walloping tale cloaked in woe, but the performances are gripping, and the wrestling sequences have the meaty slap, slam and thud of authenticity. You may not know a piledriver from a German suplex or a gutbuster drop, but, man, they all look convincingly uncomfortable here. The movie also depicts the heightened, hyped-up showmanship of the sport, with combatants huddling before matches to go over their “choreographed” moves; one cautions his opponents, “Don’t f*ck too much with my hair.” Afterward, they all go out for drinks and split up the night’s proceeds.
Songs by Tom Petty, Rush, Eddy Money, John Denver and Blue Öyster Cult add to the movie’s spot-on look and feel as the decades unfurl.
Was there a Von Erich curse? Or was everything that befell the family just an unfortunate cascade of accidents, combined with risky behaviors, macho toxicity, the high-impact lifestyle of wrestling, and the psychological pounding the Von Erich boys took from their tough-as-nails father? This brawny-lad, testosterone-fueled tale won’t bring you much festive holiday cheer, but it packs a powerful punch with its often touching, true-life saga of sibling wrestlers held together in another kind of unbreakable grip—brotherhood.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 