The Iron Claw
A Texan family of wrestlers plagued by tragedy makes up the meat and vegetables of Sean Durkin’s strangely static and ponderous true-life drama.
Fighting in the family: Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Michael J. Harney and Zac Efron
Wrestling is not the most credible of sports, which sits perfectly with the implausibility of this true-life drama. But just because it’s based on true events doesn’t make it riveting cinema. The iron claw of the title – a particularly vicious wrestling move – is a misleading moniker as this plodding saga seems more concerned with family than with any jumping around in the ring. Zac Efron plays Kevin Von Erich, a wrestler like his father before him, Fritz (Holt McCallany), who is pitted against a number of flabby middle-aged men who repeatedly trounce him. Yet Efron is buffed up like a bodybuilder, topped by a silly wig that doesn’t seem to change in the fourteen years covered by the film. In real life, Kevin was a towering 6’3”, whereas Zac Efron is not. And Kevin is not the only one, as his three brothers are also competing for the title of the NWA (National Wrestling Alliance) championship. The film’s casting would not seem to be a priority as you’d be hard-pushed to find four male siblings who looked less alike.
Fritz Von Erich tells his sons, repeatedly, that he’s waited his whole life for one of them to win the belt, which becomes extremely tedious for the viewer, so imagine how his sons feel? They’ve heard it all before, probably for every day of their lives. Much of The Iron Claw is redundant, not to say unconvincing, exacerbated by the clunky dialogue which never feels anything other than scripted words, rather than spontaneous speech. In addition, wrestling, being a rather fabricated sport, has always been a hard activity to choreograph on screen, unlike its far more brutal and realistic cousin, boxing. And the wrestling scenes here do lack that shot of adrenaline that one has come to associate with such films as Rocky, Raging Bull, Warrior, Southpaw, et al.
The approach of the writer-director Sean Durkin is very much of the slow-burn variety, where life on the Von Erich ranch is provided with little cinematic distinction. Scenes of domesticity just unfold for no apparent reason, with Durkin favouring imperceptibly slow zooms and nondescript sequences of everyday life. One suspects that Durkin is attempting to flesh out the characters of his story, but thanks to the dialogue they are forced to spout, these meatheads gain little human interest. When Kevin is picked up by an attractive fan (Lily James), not only does he seem lost for words but turns out to be a virgin – and he is the oldest of the four brothers. Of course, these were different times – the film starts in 1979 – but even so, this hermetically sealed environment seems to belong to an earlier decade.
Unsure where the film is leading us, we, the viewer, can but wait for the narrative to kick into gear, although three of the story’s most decisive highlights (a momentous win, a life-changing accident and the birth of a child) are played off-screen in the space of ten minutes. Huh? One cannot deny Durkin’s sincerity in bringing this unfortunate saga to the screen, but he doesn’t really do the family justice.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Maura Tierney, Stanley Simons, Michael J. Harney, Holt McCallany, Lily James, Aaron Dean Eisenberg, Kevin Anton, Cazzey Louis Cereghino, Chelsea Edmundson.
Dir Sean Durkin, Pro Tessa Ross, Juliette Howell, Angus Lamont, Sean Durkin and Derrin Schlesinger, Screenplay Sean Durkin, Ph Mátyás Erdély, Pro Des James Price, Ed Matthew Hannam, Music Richard Reed Parry, Costumes Jennifer Starzyk, Sound Paul Germann and Brennan Mercer, Dialect coaches Elizabeth Himelstein and Tim Monich.
Access Entertainment/BBC Film/House Productions-Lionsgate UK.
132 mins. USA/UK. 2023. US Rel: 22 December 2023. UK Rel: 9 February 2024. Cert. 15.
