It looks like Hollywood is finally starting to smarten up. Instead of giving us boring movies about stuff real Americans don’t care about — like the French Revolution and British people, in general — now we’re getting A-list productions about the single most American thing imaginable: pro rasslin’ in the ‘80s.
Now, if you’re even vaguely familiar with the Von Erich family story, you know this thing ain’t going to have a happy ending. For that matter, it doesn’t have a happy beginning OR middle. But what you DO get in “The Iron Claw” is basically a Southern-fried take on “Anna Karenina” — imagine, a tragedy penned by Tolstoy, if Tolstoy grew up in Dallas during the Reagan years.
We’ve got veteran character actor Holt McCallany playing the patriarch of the cursed brood, Jack Adkisson, Senior. Of course, the world at large knows him better as Fritz Von Erich, a character that became a folk hero in the Southwest despite the fact he was supposed to be an evil German. Naturally, you might wonder how a make-believe Nazi sympathizer became so beloved by such a large throng of working-class Americans. Maybe his signature hold — the eponymous “Iron Claw” — had something to do with it. Let this be a lesson to all political scientists and campaign strategists: Blue collar voters will overlook a lot of unsavory stuff just as long as you know how to palm a dude’s skull like a bowling ball and squeeze their forehead until he can start tasting his medulla oblongata leaking down his nasal passage.
Needless to say, Fritz seemed to enjoy keeping the bloodline running, as apparent by the fact that he sired half a dozen children. And this movie, more or less, is about all the myriad ways his parentage royally messed up his sons. Not only is it a great melodrama, it’s also a primer on how to NOT raise a child.
From the outset, old Fritz is what you might call “overbearing.” He pushes his kids to the absolute physical and mental edge nonstop, filling their heads with all sorts of nonsense about how they’re destined to conquer death itself by doing a lot of pushups.
It’s pretty obvious where all of this is headed. Without giving away too much of the story, I wouldn’t advise getting too attached to any of the characters. At all.
As a snapshot of the mid-’80s ‘rasslin scene, it’s terrific. You’ve got cameos from actors portraying all of the greats of the era, running the spectrum from Ric Flair and Harley Race to Georgia’s very own Fabulous Freebirds — the arch-rivals of the Von Erich brood, which is something they ought to be teaching kids in school today just so they grow up into well-rounded adults.
Now, as evident by the fact that this IS a biopic about professional wrestling in the 1980s, it shouldn’t surprise you that both anabolic steroids and copious abuse of cocaine factor in as prominent plot points. A little less predictable (pending, of course, you weren’t already well versed in the family backstory) are the subplots about foot amputations and obscure intestinal illnesses. A––nd there’s even bleaker and more disturbing stuff in here than that, so don’t say I didn’t warn you before you walked into the multiplex.
By and large the acting is pretty good, with former Disney Channel posterboy Zac Efron leading the ensemble as the eldest Von Erich sibling. Probably the biggest problem with the movie, though, is how it plays it fast and loose with the facts. Some real-life material is exaggerated and some of it is downplayed. Other times random events (and even people) are merged together and towards the end of the picture they just start making up all sorts of hooey. As incredible as the actual Von Erich story is, the filmmakers probably didn’t need to do so much embellishing and fabricating; and the decision to leap over some huge plot points altogether (including a fateful trip to Japan, where a central character DIED) is just plain foolish.
As a complete movie, “The Iron Claw” is a mixed bag. When it’s good, it’s really good, but when it hits the doldrums it becomes a chore to sit through. Obviously, not everything works here but I reckon just enough stuff does to merit a mild recommendation on my part.
I’ll give it a slightly above average TWO AND A HALF PIECES OF POPCORN OUT OF FOUR rating. Unless you know who Koko B. Ware and Greg “The Hammer” Valentine are, I suppose you can just wait for this one to make the rounds on Netflix.
James Swift is the managing editor of the Dalton Daily Citizen.