The killer is huge, 6'4 1/2", 300 pounds of hard
muscle running to fat. Dark,
almost black, eyes stare implacably at you from under heavy, sleepy lids. There’s no mercy, no feeling in those
eyes; he’s a black hole sucking the life right out of the room. He’s a shark, a predator, a pure
sociopath and serial killer, a sadist who found an outlet for his perverted
desires by murdering over 100 people as a contract killer for the New York
Mafia.
Watching the infamous series of groundbreaking HBO
documentaries from 1991 to 2002 on Richard Kuklinski is a
sobering, chilling experience.
Balding, with a neatly trimmed goatee beard, he’s softly spoken and
slightly breathless, a man who never needs to raise his voice. Speaking in a matter-of-fact monotone,
he recounts in conversation with a largely unseen psychiatrist the details of a
career in murder that included stabbing, shooting, beating, strangling,
poisoning and gassing his victims.
Known as ‘the Iceman’, not because of his coolness as
many people thought but because he often froze his victims’ bodies to obscure
their time of death, he made snuff movies of some of his victims, setting up
time-lapse cameras to record the horror as he fed them, alive, to starved
rats. He was implicated in the
murders of union leader Jimmy Hoffa and gangster Roy DeMeo. He killed for money but also for
pleasure. He killed people for the
sport and he killed people for the practice – experimenting with different
methods, refining them, perfecting them.
He killed men, he killed women, he killed the innocent and guilty alike,
his only moral restriction being that he probably wouldn’t kill a child. Any film about him should be a horror
show, a grand guignol, soaked in blood and perversity; it should make your skin
crawl, should chill you to the bone.
Which is why Ariel Vroman’s pedestrian true-crime
thriller The Iceman, based on Anthony Bruno’s
best-selling biography is such a disappointment, turning a genuinely terrifying
American bogeyman into an antihero with an admirable work ethic.
Starring Hollywood nutbag de jour Michael Shannon as
Kuklinski, the film is content to follow the well-trodden path of Hollywood
Mafia hitman movies – the rise and fall of a ruthless, efficient but honourable
killer (no women, no kids remember) juggles everyday family life with murdering
a lot of people before ultimately being brought down by hubris and the betrayal
of a stinking rat. Cliché-ridden
and by-the-numbers, the film tones down Kuklinski’s excesses (none of the
really horrible murders make it in or the fact that he used to choose random
victims in the street as practice kills) charting his rise during the ‘70s and
‘80s from smalltime pornographer to terrifying contract killer as he carves out
his own slice of the American Dream, marrying nice Catholic girl Deborah (Winona
Ryder) and starting a family in suburban New Jersey as he
commutes to the city doing hits for paranoid, psychotic mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray
Liotta, who else?) and forming a bizarre partnership with
ice cream van-driving assassin Chris Evans.
As ever, Shannon gives his customary bug-eyed loon
Marmite performance, which is somehow far less terrifying than his recent turn
as foul-mothed, inventively sweary, Delta Gamma sorority sister Rebecca
Martinson. An
intelligent sadist who, once caged, was genuinely interested in what allowed
him to commit such horrific acts, collaborating on several documentaries and
working with psychologists and profilers in an attempt to understand his
bizarre pathology, The Iceman turns Kuklinski into a
lumbering, near mute thug with intimacy issues. Ryder meanwhile is bland in the thankless role of
Kuklinski’s put-upon wife while Ray Liotta is just Ray Liotta again only more
so. There are nice turns however
from Stephen Dorff as Kuklinski’s jailed paedophile brother
and David Schwimmer (yup, Ross from Friends) as a
doomed smalltime gangster. Perhaps
the best performance in the film however comes from Captain America
himself, Chris Evans, whose Vietnam veteran turned ice cream assassin is as
genuinely disturbing as his real-life counterpart Robert Prongay.
A two-star timewaster of a crime film, there is
nothing as chilling in this film as the moment Kuklinski tells Dr Park Dietz in the
2002 documentary not to like him too much as he’s not a nice guy, The Iceman earns
its extra star for a scene where sleazeball photographer James Franco weeps and
begs on his knees for his life before being executed by Shannon. Not enough films feature a sniveling
Franco beg for mercy before being shot in the face.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Michael Shannon, Ray Liotta, David Schwimmer, Chris Evans, Ryan O'Nan, Christa Campbell, Stephen Dorff, Winona Ryder and James Franco
Genres:
Crime, Drama, Thriller
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 46 minutes
Certificate:
15
UK Release Date:
Friday 7th June 2013
Rating:
3/5
Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-iceman-review/
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