![‘The Iron Claw’ Review: Body Slams and Broken Lives](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/12/20/multimedia/iron-claw-review-hqtm/iron-claw-review-hqtm-facebookJumbo.jpg)
It doesn’t take long into “The Iron Claw,” a tragicomic melodrama about an American wrestling dynasty, to know that the wildest scenes aren’t going to happen in the ring. They’re going to take place in the family circle, which is evident when the paterfamilias starts listing the order of his favorite sons while they’re chowing down at the breakfast table. It’s weird, though nobody looks as surprised as you feel. Then the writer-director Sean Durkin twists the knife a wee bit more: “The rankings,” the father says brightly, “can always change.”
Pitched between comedy and an inchoate creepiness (what’s going on here, you think), the scene exemplifies the edgy, off-kilter tone that Durkin establishes early in “The Iron Claw,” a smooth, spooky, often moving fictionalized account of a family of Texas professional wrestlers. Starting in the 1970s, the sons followed the father, Jack Barton Adkisson, a.k.a. Fritz Von Erich, into the slam-bam business. With their spectacular hair, musculature and moves — their flying drop kicks, twisting arm locks and discus punches — the sons became local sensations. TV syndication amped their fame, but by the 1990s the family had been gutted by tragedy.
The story charts the family’s rise in pro wrestling, picking up in 1963 when Jack (a volcanic Holt McCallany) was performing as a German villain. As Fritz Von Erich, Jack liked to strut into the ring with an Iron Cross on his uniform and finish with his signature move, the Iron Claw, a vice grip that he applied to an opponent’s head, at times drawing blood. It was a suitably grim, showy bequest that Jack passed, along with the Von Erich brand, onto his sons, who also drew blood, if not always in the ring. (The movie references one son who died in a childhood accident, but also omits crucial facts about the Von Erichs, including a sixth son.)
The way into “The Iron Claw” is the emotionally opaque Kevin (Zac Efron, so pumped he looks like he’ll burst), his father’s second favorite who clearly wants top ranking. Kevin serves as the story’s through line, its narrator and, in the final stretch, its unconvincing agent of change. “Ever since I was a child,” he says after the film opens, “people said my family was cursed.” The family never talked about it; then again, this taciturn bunch doesn’t do much sharing, which presents some problems for Durkin. The mother, Doris (Maura Tierney in a thin role), “tried to protect us with God,” Kevin adds, while his father tried to do the same with wrestling.