The Iceman
Directed by Ariel Vromen
Written by Ariel Vromen and Morgan Land
USA, 2013
It’s kind of baffling that it’s taken this long to make a movie about Richard Kuklinski. Quiet family man is secretly a prolific murderer working as a hitman for the Jersey mob, completely unbeknownst to his family? That’s the kind of thing Hollywood loves, give him nymphomaniac wife and Lou Gehrig’s disease and you got a three picture series with Robert Downey Jr. and Naomi Watts, no problem. Maybe throw in Jerry Stiller as the comedically Jewish dad.
Instead, we’ve got The Iceman, a somewhat under-the-radar thriller starring Michael Shannon, Ray Liotta, Ray Liotta’s increasingly weird hairline, Winona Ryder, Chris Evans and directed by fairly unknown filmmaker Ariel Vromen.
The short version is that the film is a fairly average mob/thriller/drama affair that wisely focuses on the human drama rather than the gory details of Kuklinski’s career as a professional corpse-ifier. This is something that could easily have been reduced to exploitative murder-porn, interested more in gruesome kills and the occasional gun fight than characterization. Not that there’s anything wrong with that per-se, there are fewer more fun ways to spend an evening than with a movie with a healthy body count and a decent gore effects budget. But given that this is based on a real story involving real people with real lawyers, and Gangster Squad taught us the lesson of using real events as inspiration for cartoony violence, the choice to make The Iceman a fairly subdued film that focuses on Kuklinski as a character was probably a good call.
That being said, aside from a few wise choices there isn’t anything particularly brilliant or ground-breaking about the film. As a period piece, set in 1980s Jersey, it’s fairly visually strong, striking a balance between hitting us over the head with exaggerated period details (ala Gangster Squad. That movie’s like an object lesson in failure…) and getting so many little things wrong that the audience can occasionally forget they’re watching a period film (See: X-Men First Class). In a lot of ways, this is accomplished through hairstyles and subtle dress cues, and it would be fair to say this is less a movie than it is a facial hair conveyance system. The sideburns in this flick are effing legendary, and David Schwimmer spends all of his screentime rocking a massive handlebar ‘stache, sideburns and ponytail. Even Liotta’s character at one point asks him if he’s really sure about that mustache, prompting knowing giggles from the audience.
Speaking of the cast, they tend to present as many problems as anything else. Michael Shannon is pulling all the dramatic weight as Kuklinski, pulling off the quiet guy with a hidden violent side pretty well. It’s the kind of performance where you’re left guessing if the character is genuinely sociopathic or maybe even some kind of high-functioning autistic. Unfortunately his co-stars are pretty disposable. Winona Ryder is basically a cardboard cutout as the wife, with no real personality or motivation outside whatever the scene calls for. Ray Liotta is basically every slick mob boss ever, and just drops out of the movie at one point once he’s run out of interesting things to do. Chris Evans is somewhat interesting as a manic fellow hitman, first appearing sporting the kind of greasy hippie hair, muttonchops and mustache combo you can only really see anymore in vintage porn, almost as though he was trying to distance himself from a certain image to avoid future typecasting.
There’s also a few problems with pacing and scripting. Kuklinski is shown to have a propensity for amateur throat surgery before he starts getting paid for it, but how deep it goes is left ambiguous. This was possibly an attempt to build mystique around the character, but that seems to work at odds to the goal of shedding light into his character that the film seems to be going for most of the time. His relationship with Ryder’s character is also massively underdeveloped, and we literally cut from them making awful first date chatter to them being married with kids, and everything starts to unravel so quickly we never get a feel for how their relationship works.
Back to the good stuff however, there is a bit of perhaps unintentional trope-bending at play. It seems to be a staple of hitman movies that the killer du jour gets shaken out of his established routine by sparing an innocent bystander (a child or woman, usually) which then prompts him down the road of heroism or at least antiheroism. This scene plays out exactly the way you’d expect in The Iceman, but everything after seems to subvert expectations, especially given that this act sets Kuklinski down a darker path than before, rather than a redemptive one.
In the end though, these few glimmers of interesting writing and characterization don’t save The Iceman from being just an ok film. While it does have its moments, it never quite manages to really use Kuklinksi’s life and story in any really interesting way, and in the pantheon of crime/hitman movies, this one will probably be forgotten fairly quickly.
