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Review: Iron Claw (2023)
I have to admit, coming into Iron Claw I expected it to be a decent movie but not a fantastic one. I was partial to watching it but my roommate really wanted to and I also have a deep love for Jeremy Allen White after binge-watching The Bear this summer. So I thought, why not. Needless to say, it blew me away beyond my expectations.
The Iron Claw is a heart-wrenching movie about a patriarch who is a former wrestler, forever regretting not winning the championship WWE belt and basically making his four sons' lives hell all in the a mission to get them to achieve his dreams of being a supreme wrestler and winning the title.
For all of its crazy wrestling scenes, training montages and close up shots of Zac Efron (playing Kevin Von-Erick the oldest son)'s abs, Iron Claw was surprisingly less about wrestling and more a horrifying montage of the rot that toxic masculinity perpetuates. It also illustrates the layered and devastating impacts of making your love conditional and the lengths children will go to simply to make their parent proud.
Now this isn't a new concept. This idea of unbridled expectations and parents using their children as a vehicle for achieving the things they missed out on and their youth. However, I think what's unique about Iron Claw besides the absolutely fantastic hair and makeup team bringing the 80s to life right on Zac and Jeremy's heads but also what I assume was a 24-hour oil team that would just slick all of them in sweat looking liquid the whole time, is that insane physicality that the movie portrayed. You could literally see these boys destroy their bodies and push themselves to their very absolute physical limits to achieve the goal of being successful at wrestling. I don't think this would have been possible without an amazing cinematography team because not only would be see these insane shots of their muscles one moment, or the next it would cut to a shot close up of an injection of probably steroids into a buttock or this really engaging scene where we just saw Zac Efron's character throw himself against the sides of the ring back and forth back and forth training over and over, the ring literally vibrating with his desperation. This film did an amazing job of showing rather than telling
At the same time you could see this exact same process uraveling as they descended into madness mentally too. It was almost ironic if it weren't so sad as a running theme throughout the movie was this idea that their family was cursed and bad things would keep happening to them and in the same breath their father would say "no days off", "keep pushing" and such. In retrospect, it's a very simple message to take away, obsession with perfection is maddening, parental expectations is damaging. But much in the same way that "Barbie" portrayed a very simple and basic feminist message, maybe this is what works is sticking to one simple idea and doing it very, very well.
Finally, I have so much love for the performances. Lily James held her own as Kevin's doting and supportive wife, all four actors playing the brothers were phenomenal, and even the parents painted a very convincing story, the dad with his unrelenting rage and the mom with her quiet indifference.
Overall, a really powerful portrayal of childhood trauma shaping violent and unfulfilling futures. I gave it my first five stars of 2024.
