This movie is like a bunch of pretty threads that have been inexpertly woven together into an awkward looking sweater. Writer/director Mickey Fisher and his cast do some things quite well, but the whole production is less than the sum of its parts. It's like somebody who could have made a good short film tried to make a feature and didn't really know how to fill up the extra time. The result is a number of individual scenes that are very appealing scattered amongst some stuff that's remarkably more amateurish.
Tyler Wells (Jonathan Clark) is a 30 year old factory worker whose glorious football career died in a high school car accident that left him with a bum arm. Tyler does have a smokin' hot wife named Hope (Kate Arrington) with a kid on the way and a couple of buddies named Kel and Weej (Mickey Fisher and Scott Hunt) who are even lower on life's totem pole than Tyler is, so you'd think he'd be pretty happy. But Tyler is still haunted by the thought he'll never be what he once dreamed of and worked so hard for, so he decides to enter a local tough man contest for a last grasp at being special. Unfortunately, his estranged brother Gabe (Dominic Bogart) has also entered the contest as a way to get out from under Tyler's shadow, which he's felt blanketed by his whole life. Will these battling brothers rediscover their love for each other in the ring? Well, that actually happens long before the tough man contest, resulting in an extended anti-climax that highlights writer/director Fisher's ignorance on how to tell a feature length story.
The best moments in The King Of Iron Town are when Fisher has two characters in a scene where they just talk about their hopes and their fears and their frustrations. Whether it's Hope trying to penetrate Tyler's yearning for more than what he has in life or Tyler and Gabe confronting their long simmering resentments, there's a plain spoken eloquence to the dialog, a naturalistic feel to the performances and the camera-work is unobtrusively effective. You can connect with the characters as real people and become invested in how things turn out for them. Fisher also displays a perfectly acceptable sense of humor and a sense of how to make things look good when you've got a budget that could buy a bag of donuts and three sticks of gum.
In between those good moments, however, is a lot of stuff that ranges from unnecessary to stupid. There are way too many montages in this movie and way, way, waaaaay too many sub-mediocre songs that blare up at regular intervals. Fisher also has very little grasp on a disjointed plot that shuffles characters in and out of the story like they're on a very slow Ferris wheel. It's like he can't handle more than two people on screen at the same time and when the plot needs somebody new to move forward, somebody else has got to disappear. For example, Kel is training Tyler to fight at first, but when Gabe shows up to start training with his brother, Kel is literally never seen or even referred to again until the tough man contest at the end.
There are also too many establishing shots, the Weej role is completely superfluous and Fisher totally blows the conflict between Tyler and Gabe. As I mentioned, Fisher establishes the animosity between the brothers and then resolves it BEFORE the tough man contest. I can appreciate he may have been trying to avoid cliché, but sometimes clichés are better than robbing your conclusion of 95% of its dramatic impact. And a tertiary subplot about the factory closing down never comes off as anything more than lame overkill.
What's good about The King Of Iron Town is good enough to make it worth watching. What's not good about it is more disappointing than aggravating, which puts it above a great many indy flicks that have made me want to throw a cement block at my TV. If ordinary people grappling with their ordinary lives are your thing, give this movie a chance.
Tyler Wells (Jonathan Clark) is a 30 year old factory worker whose glorious football career died in a high school car accident that left him with a bum arm. Tyler does have a smokin' hot wife named Hope (Kate Arrington) with a kid on the way and a couple of buddies named Kel and Weej (Mickey Fisher and Scott Hunt) who are even lower on life's totem pole than Tyler is, so you'd think he'd be pretty happy. But Tyler is still haunted by the thought he'll never be what he once dreamed of and worked so hard for, so he decides to enter a local tough man contest for a last grasp at being special. Unfortunately, his estranged brother Gabe (Dominic Bogart) has also entered the contest as a way to get out from under Tyler's shadow, which he's felt blanketed by his whole life. Will these battling brothers rediscover their love for each other in the ring? Well, that actually happens long before the tough man contest, resulting in an extended anti-climax that highlights writer/director Fisher's ignorance on how to tell a feature length story.
The best moments in The King Of Iron Town are when Fisher has two characters in a scene where they just talk about their hopes and their fears and their frustrations. Whether it's Hope trying to penetrate Tyler's yearning for more than what he has in life or Tyler and Gabe confronting their long simmering resentments, there's a plain spoken eloquence to the dialog, a naturalistic feel to the performances and the camera-work is unobtrusively effective. You can connect with the characters as real people and become invested in how things turn out for them. Fisher also displays a perfectly acceptable sense of humor and a sense of how to make things look good when you've got a budget that could buy a bag of donuts and three sticks of gum.
In between those good moments, however, is a lot of stuff that ranges from unnecessary to stupid. There are way too many montages in this movie and way, way, waaaaay too many sub-mediocre songs that blare up at regular intervals. Fisher also has very little grasp on a disjointed plot that shuffles characters in and out of the story like they're on a very slow Ferris wheel. It's like he can't handle more than two people on screen at the same time and when the plot needs somebody new to move forward, somebody else has got to disappear. For example, Kel is training Tyler to fight at first, but when Gabe shows up to start training with his brother, Kel is literally never seen or even referred to again until the tough man contest at the end.
There are also too many establishing shots, the Weej role is completely superfluous and Fisher totally blows the conflict between Tyler and Gabe. As I mentioned, Fisher establishes the animosity between the brothers and then resolves it BEFORE the tough man contest. I can appreciate he may have been trying to avoid cliché, but sometimes clichés are better than robbing your conclusion of 95% of its dramatic impact. And a tertiary subplot about the factory closing down never comes off as anything more than lame overkill.
What's good about The King Of Iron Town is good enough to make it worth watching. What's not good about it is more disappointing than aggravating, which puts it above a great many indy flicks that have made me want to throw a cement block at my TV. If ordinary people grappling with their ordinary lives are your thing, give this movie a chance.
