Were the Von Erichs cursed? It’s hard to describe them any other way; they had a strangely high mortality rate for such an athletic bunch. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Von Erichs were a family of rasslers. Professional rasslers. I want to say they were “small time,” but that isn’t quite fair. They owned their own local “arena” which brought good-size crowds on a regular basis. Professional wrestling has so many competing leagues it’s nearly impossible to tell the minors from the majors if you don’t really care. Suffice to say, the Von Erichs were a family of talented professional wrestlers who were good enough to make a decent living doing such. Were they world famous? Yes and no. Let me put it this way: Do you know who Monica Seles is? She was far bigger in her sport than the Von Erichs were in theirs. Pockets of wrestling fandom certainly knew who they were.
To start, patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) was an asshole. He’s the kind of father who only appreciated sons; lucky for him, he had five of them and no girls. He also only appreciated children who behaved as he would; he ranked his children, told them their ranking, and made public the fact that “those rankings could change at any time.” He wasn’t kidding. The man constantly played favorites and felt zero appreciation for disciplines he hadn’t mastered himself. Before he retired to ownership, Fritz was a pro-wrestler and even his signature move, The Iron Claw, was asshole-ish in nature – as it almost certainly was a move (a tension grip to the soft spots in an opponent’s head) intended to injure rather than dominate (although it could do both).
The sons: Kevin (Zac Efron), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson), Mike (Stanley Simons), and the long deceased Jack were all ranked on how much they followed the old man’s plan. The movie begins with the chiseled Kevin on top as the current Texas heavyweight wrestling champion, and Mike on the bottom, for the latter had no wrestling ambition; he was a guitarist.
The Iron Claw drifts in and out of the poignant family moments while reminding us, consistently, that dad was Great Santini-like asshole. It’s weird how much these guys never wanted to be separated. To this end, wrestling was a perfect fit for Kevin, Kerry, and David. They could train together, fight together, trash talk together; they always had each other’s backs, which is important in the milieu. The most frustrating part of the film for me is that while the brothers Von Erich were certainly unique individuals with unique POVs, their ambitions were not. I don’t know that any of them loved wrestling, but they all wanted to please their ogre of a father, which led to some fairly severe consequences.
I appreciated this film right off the bat for asking the question that is always on my mind when it comes to this subject: Isn’t professional wrestling “fake?” The answer is yes, the matches are scripted, but – and this is important- as Kevin describes it: you can’t think of it as play acting; it’s more like job review/job performance. Those who rise to the top of the wrestling game are not there solely because they were chosen to be there; they rose to the top based on job performance. Part of the performance is look, which one can hone with style and gym-work, part of the performance is skill and technique; how well do you do the things people want to see in the ring? Do you have a signature move? Are you good at it? And, finally, it’s about the hype – are you good at the sound bytes? The ridiculous overacting? The manner outside the ring that makes the fans go crazy? Kevin had the body and the moves to rise to the top of the profession, but the film makes no bones that he couldn’t handle the jaw work. Fans of wrestling want to pay homage to athletes who play the game outside the ring as well as they play it inside the ring. That’s how one rises to the apex of the “sport.”
And don’t kid yourself; there is a ton of athleticism involved in professional wrestling. For “acting,” there’s a lot of punishing stunt work. And in this film, there’s a lot of tighty whities. The Iron Claw is set mostly during the late 70s and early 80s, before underwear 
became something … else. This is a family of bad hair and tighty whities out the wazoo … none of which changes much when they enter the ring.
For most of this film, I stared at Zac Efron mumbling, “Good lord, man, what did you do to your body? It looks like you swallowed an entire GNC.” Sources say he “only” put on 15 pounds of muscle. Um … ok. Guess it helps that he’s not 6’2” like the real Kevin Von Erich. Still, it’s a heckuva transformation.
For me, The Iron Claw sort of wavered. I appreciated much more than I usually do that the film was biographical in nature. It made the moments bigger in my mind … but it also made the (multiple) tragedies weigh too heavily. A fictional piece would have toned it down a little for being unrealistic and depressing. What I mostly took from this biographical disaster film was the Von Erichs were cursed with being too close. That will kill ya, man.
The story of the family Von Erich
Who excelled at a skill most barbaric
Their fate wasn’t kind
And it may blow your mind
They’d have been better off being generic
Rated R, 132 Minutes
Director: Sean Durkin
Writer: Sean Durkin
Genre: This shit is real?
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Wrestling fans
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Fritz Von Erich
