#2: The Iron Claw

Release Date: December 22, 2023

Format: Theater (Cinemark Grand Cinemas in Walla Walla, WA)

Written by: Sean Durkin

Directed by: Sean Durkin

2.5 Stars

The Iron Claw nails the third act, which I guess if you had to pick which act to nail, that would be the one. But for the first two hours I was wrestling - pun intended - with a few different aspects of this film.

The first problem I had was with tone. Writer/director Sean Durkin is making a serious art house movie here, folks, so put on your serious art house faces. Durkin seems to have a chip on his shoulder about the fact that his protagonists wrestle each other in their underwear. No need. We like that pro wrestling is as raucous and silly as it is. The Iron Claw doesn’t need to be so tonally dour throughout. Remember that scene in The Wrestler when Mickey Rourke finally convinces Marisa Tomei to come out and have a drink with him at a bar? They start dancing to a hair metal song on the jukebox and reminiscing about the 1980s and just how fun it was. The audience smiles because they can imagine Randy the Ram in his glory days. In contrast, The Iron Claw’s glory days just never seem that glorious.

Which brings me to my second problem, well second and third problems. We’ll call them 2A and 2B.

Problem 2A: The Wrestler casts an enormous shadow over this movie. The lineup of wrestling movies is thin, and the list of great wrestling movies is even thinner. Actually, it might just be The Wrestler, which shares tone and theme with The Iron Claw. But The Wrestler imbues its tragedy with pathos and humor, while The Iron Claw follows a rote itinerary of tragic loss after tragic loss. It’s a bit of a bummer. It needs a scene of Zac Efron wearing a silly hair net, slicing deli meat for old ladies at a rundown grocery store.

This leads me to Problem 2B: Much like The Iron Claw living under the shadow of The Wrestler, Zac Efron’s performance suffers a bit in comparison to Mickey Rourke’s. I don’t know how else to say it, but Mickey Rourke looks like an aging former heavyweight wrestling champion from the 1980s. He has the physicality and the aura. Zac Efron does not. He looks like a diminutive, handsome young actor on a steroid cycle, playing the part of a wrestler. His performance is fine, even if the casting is less than.

But hey, in the third act the movie gets up off the canvas and hits some really pretty notes. It turns out to be a decent enough wrestling movie, even if it’s mostly kind of a bummer.