The Iceman is based on the real-life goings-on of Mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski (Shannon) who worked for Newark’s DeCavalcante crime family and New York City’s Five Families. Kuklinski is said to have murdered over 100 men, possibly up to 250, between 1948 and 1986, while living the other half of his double live as a husband and father in a quite suburban life with a wife and two children. Kuklinski earned his icy nickname after freezing victims’ corpses in an industrial freezer to disguise the time of death.
Matching Kuklinski in height to produce a towering force, Shannon is like a curious ticking time bomb in this, whose Jekyll-and-Hyde persona allows the actor to combine moments of measured calm and unexpected sensitivity when it comes to his family with explosive rage in a deadly profession. Vromen’s film captures an awkward, almost shy Kuklinski in his early courting days around future wife Deborah Pellicotti, played by Winona Ryder. With both Shannon and Ryder’s easy knack for playing the vulnerable, these scenes have an almost endearing fragility and innocence to them, allowing The Iceman to show a small flicker of humanity and purpose other than killing. In this respect we come to sympathise with his determination to protect what matters, making his character less two-dimensional and all the more unpredictable.
Naturally, no Mafia film would be complete without an appearance by Liotta who plays the steely cold and unhinged crime boss Roy Demeo with unsurprising ease, though Liotta ratchets up the malice in this, more so than we have seen him do so before in this genre. There is also a nice and virtually unrecognisable performance from Chris Evans as Mr Freezy, the ice-cream-van-driving hitman who inspired Kuklinski’s deep-freeze methods, proving this actor has intriguing and yet unplucked strings to his bow than the average superhero portrayal.
With a dynamic Shannon at the helm doing what he does best, Vromen’s film has an out-of-control vehicle to drive it up the box office listings, coupled with a healthy interest in the movements of one notorious serial killer, however complacent and conventional the rest of the film feels – admittedly, hard to escape from within the Mafia gangster genre. Again, this simply re-emphasises the urgent need to witness Shannon terrorising the frame before Superman swoops in.
[Rating:4/5]