The Iron Claw

Year 17, Day 235 - 8/23/25 - Movie #5,119

BEFORE: Well, it's been another big week here at the Movie Year, with a lot of films set in the southern U.S., and from what I can tell, most everything was filmed in Louisiana - that Louisiana Film Board has been working HARD these last few years to give out those tax incentives to get more movies made there. I just read an article that said they filed new legislation in June to increase (or prolong, maybe) those tax incentives there, essentially making Louisiana the Hollywood of the South. 

Yep, "Hit Man", "Queen & Slim", "Nickel Boys", "Unhinged" and "Big George Foreman" were all filmed entirely or partially in Louisiana - but if you're like me, you could tell that just from the cast lists, with Gralen Bryant Banks and Tre Styles and Samantha Beaulieu turning up multiple times. The exception this week was "Hangman", which was filmed around Atlanta - tonight's film was set in Texas, but it was filmed around Baton Rouge. So yeah, it's mostly been a week for the Pelican State and the Big Easy. 

Michael Papajohn carries over from "Big George Foreman" for the last time (for now) and we go from a boxing film to a wrestling film. That works, right? 

THE PLOT: The true story of the Von Erich brothers, who made history in the intensely competitive world of professional wrestling in the early 1980's. 

AFTER: Most sports stories tend to be uplifting, or at least they try to be - like, who doesn't want to watch a movie about the winners? Whether it's a baseball movie, a football movie or a boxing movie, we're made to care about the athletes by getting a peek into their personal lives and then we want to see them win. Even "Nyad", none of us really felt that Diana Nyad had an engaging personality, she was honestly a bit rough around the edges, but didn't we all want to see her make it to Cuba, swimming unassisted? Though if she'd quit after being stung by jellyfish, I don't think we'd blame her for that. Sports favors the winners, but in most sports only 50% of the players can be winners on any given day, and that's the maximum. Only one driver can win an auto race and one horse can win a horse race, and then if you want to talk championships only one NFL team out of 32 can win the Super Bowl and only one MLB team out of 30 can win the World Series. So ultimately I think we can say there are more losers in sports than winners. 

Boxing and wrestling are sort of strange exceptions, like a lot of people have been boxing's Heavyweight World Champion over the years, and then when you factor in the other weight classes, maybe it's more people than you might think who can call themselves champions. And since wrestling is (at least partially) scripted - come on, you know it is - there are a lot of people who own championship belts in wrestling. I think everyone in the WWE has worn a championship belt at some point, even. Google is telling me that even Vince McMahon held the WWF title at some point, which sounds a very big conflict of interest if the league owner is somehow eligible to be the champion. But, we live in a world where the U.S. President is now somehow in charge of the D.C. police force and the Kennedy Center, and that's barely raised a stir after all the shite that's gone down in his first administration. (Me, I think the trouble all started back when Jeb Bush was in charge of the Florida elections, and his brother George W. was a candidate and we all just kind of let that happen.)

So the debate rages, is professional wrestling a sport? Well, college wrestling is a sport, and Olympic wrestling is a sport, but then when you get to the WWE and similar leagues, things tend to get a little fuzzier. I get that there are "faces" and "heels" and they develop these rivalries which are meant to keep the fans interested, honestly the storylines tend to resemble ongoing soap operas or even comic book battles at some point. Spider-Man has his set of villains, the Avengers have a different set, sometimes there's cross-over or the heroes team up or the villains team up, you know, you've got to keep it spicy. As for the moves, many of the more complicated ones require work being done on both sides, like the jumping off the top rope just doesn't work unless the recipient is within a certain distance to the ropes and also happens to be looking the other way. The multiple participants work out their moves in advance, so that alone calls the whole sport into question. It's a physical activity, and it's grueling work, but it simply can't be called a sport if the outcomes are pre-determined and the moves are rehearsed. Sorry. 

The way that the Von Erich family talks about their plan also gives us some insight - the father, Fritz, knows how things work and he has a plan for his boys, he wants one of them to bring a belt home, really he wants ALL of them to be world champion at some point, and he even knows what order it should happen in, for the maximum dramatic effect. What does THAT tell you?  He knows that if one of his sons fights the current champion, and it's a good, entertaining and well-viewed match, that puts his son in contention for the title. The same sort of thing happens with boxing, contenders getting title shots, only boxing isn't fixed. Err, not as much, anyway. But then this is a father who constantly ranks his own children and announces the order in which they are currently his favorites, and really, everything we know about parenting now tells us that's exactly not what any parent should do. You're supposed to love all your children equally, and if that's not possible, you're supposed to at least pretend that you do, otherwise one ends up being spoiled and the other ends up as a serial killer or something. Really, it's not rocket surgery. 

So if you want to think of this family of four wrestling sons as "cursed", I say that's B.S. There are hardships in every person's life, every single one of us at some point will have to deal with the death of a loved one, or an injury to ourselves, or at least come to terms with our own physical limitations. OK, maybe not the oldest brother, who died at the age of 5, but really he's a bit busy being dead so I'm back to my main point, everyone currently alive will have to deal with tragedy in the future, up to and including their own demise. That's not "cursed", that's the price we all pay for being alive. But people fall back on that word "cursed" after several tragedies in a row, because they have no other way to explain the proximity of those events. My grandmother always used to tell me that "people die in threes", but I noticed that when the fourth person died, she just started over, counting at "1". So it's all in how you look at it. 

I always think of the "Superman" curse - people look at what happened to Christopher Reeve, and also George Reeves, Margot Kidder, etc. and draw the conclusion that something about playing those characters had a role in them dying - or being in the "Poltergeist" movie, same deal. Well, Gene Hackman went on to live a bunch more years, and Dean Cain, who also played "Superman" seems to be in good health, so believing in "the curse" means discounting any information that doesn't support the theory, so therefore there is no curse. Look, everyone who was in "Gone With the Wind" is now dead, do we say there's a curse there? No, because the life expectancy of everyone and everything, over time, is zero. There's no bad luck, either, there's just accidents and in some cases systemic behavior that causes injury or eventual death. 

So I'd argue that instead of believing in a "curse" on the family, it might be worth pointing out that wrestling is a tough activity, even when the moves are rehearsed, so there's always a chance of fatal injury even when care is taken, or there's damage done to the body from repeated falls, head trauma, torn muscles and other minor injuries, also CTE and spinal damage that can accumulate over time. Also, shooting up with steroids for a lengthy period of time can also cause damage, and then it looks like some of the brothers were doing more recreational drugs, too. Then you factor in risky behavior like riding motorcycles, owning guns, etc. - I know, that's all the fun stuff down South - but in a family that's not only very competitive but dominated by a heavy-handed father figure who is incapable of expressing emotions in a positive way, it starts to look more like a recipe for disaster from the start, rather than a curse. 

Once the brothers sustain a few injuries (which, come on, kind of comes with the territory in wrestling) the family is really in a long downward spiral. It's not a happy journey for the audience, which is what's surprising in a sports movie, but maybe it shouldn't be? This is based on a real story about real people who got injured and couldn't handle it. There are other jobs besides pro wrestling, after all, but perhaps these brothers were so brainwashed by their father that this is the only way they believed there was to be, because that's what they were told. It was certainly the only path to win their father's love and/or respect, and that situation's at the root of the problem, it's really what did the most damage, if you ask me. 

There's a scene at the end with a lot of emotional impact, Kevin von Erich imagines his brothers getting together in the afterlife, there's a nod to Greek mythology as one crosses a river in a rowboat, similar to Charon's ferry across the river Styx. Sure, it's nice to imagine that there's an afterlife and we'll all be reunited with our deceased loved ones someday, but their oldest brother who died at age 5 is there, and he's still five years old!  So, that means if you die, you're THAT age in heaven for eternity, and like if you lost an arm or something, you don't get it restored in the afterlife, so, really, what's the point? I guess if you died in a fire you just walk around heaven all burned up and stuff. Really, this is somehow both not encouraging and also sort of proof to me that the whole afterlife thing's just more B.S.

Directed by Sean Durkin (director of "Martha March May Marlene" and producer of "The Rental")

Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Jeremy Allen White (last seen in "The Rental"), Harris Dickinson (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Maura Tierney (last seen in "Twisters"), Stanley Simons, Holt McCallany (last seen in "Creepshow 2"), Lily James (last seen in "The Exception"), Michael J. Harney (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Grady Wilson, Valentine Newcomer, Scott Innes (last heard in "Scooby-Doo"), Chavo Guerrero Jr.,Jullian Dulce Vida (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire"), Cazzey Louis Cereghino, Ryan Nemeth (last seen in "Pee-Wee's Big Holiday"), Kevin Anton, Brady Pierce, Silas Mason, Devin Imbraguglio, Kristina Kingston (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large"), Jim Gleason (last seen in "Blue Bayou"), Maxwell Friedman, Aaron Dean Eisenberg, Leo Franich, Sam Franich, Chelsea Edmundson (last seen in "Army of the Dead"), Romeo Newcomer, Terry J. Nelson, J.T. Fletcher, Chad Governale, Robert K E Hughes (last seen in "Nickel Boys") with archive footage of Jimmy Carter (last seen in "Rather".

RATING: 5 out of 10 referees who never see the illegal moves for some reason