Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of The Iron Claw. This was undoubtedly one of, if not my favorite movie of the year. Also easily the darkest movie I’ve ever seen. This movie is based on a true story about a couple of brothers trying to make their name in the wrestling world under their domineering father. It also is important to note that it takes place in the early 80s, right when wrestling was truly starting to take off. There are 4 brothers, named Kevin, Kerry, David, and Mike Von Erich. Kevin is played by Zach Efron and Kerry is played by Jeremy Allen White. They both absolutely killed it in the entire movie. The emotion that these two both showed whether it was with dialogue or not was next level. All 4 of these brothers have their own tragic story, and each one is focused on at some point in the movie. Kevin is the main wrestler in the family, Kerry is an Olympic athlete who finds his way to the wrestling ring eventually, David is an up-and-coming wrestler to follow Kevin’s footsteps, and Mike sings and does a lot of work with cameras and doesn’t want anything to do with wrestling. Mike was played by Stanley Simons, who was also phenomenal and I don’t see him getting enough recognition. He wasn’t the main focus of the brothers, but he still displayed great emotion and probably had the most tragic story out of the four.
This is usually where I talk about our villain in the movie, but this movie is a lot different than the ones I’ve reviewed so far. If I had to pick an antagonist, I would definitely say it’s their own father Fritz Von Erich. A former wrestler who never won a championship, so he’s trying to live out his dream through his children. Just a truly evil person, and they display that time and time again throughout the movie. Just doesn’t care about his own family at all, and only cares about wrestling and making his kids wrestle. Holt McCallany also deserves his props. He was perfectly able to display how bad of a person Fritz truly was. From a directing standpoint, this movie was perfectly shot as well. The in-ring scenes were fantastic and the camera work was on point. Sean Durkin deserves a massive shoutout for his job as the director. There were also some cool wrestling cameos, for the people that are actually fans of it and know the history behind it like me. They had cameos of people playing Ric Flair, Harley Race, Iron Sheik, and they also showed one of the most famous wrestling matches of its time between The Von Erichs vs The Fabulous Freebirds. The score was also great, with them having a great song choice in Tom Sawyer by Rush.
I always rate movies I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the show. Those things are action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this movie a 98/100, and like I’ve been saying this entire time, this movie truly has no flaws. Everything is paced perfectly, some of the best acting I’ve seen in a while, and even the ending was done perfectly. Kevin’s kids drop an absolutely heartbreaking line at the end that symbolizes how sad this story is. One of the movies I was most hyped for this year, and it still just blew me away. Also, Zach Efron 100% should be nominated for an Oscar this year. It would be highway robbery if he gets left off.
