The Iceman

Firstly lets get to what’s good about the film. Shannon is excellent as Kuklinski. He brings his imposing physicality to the role and here, more than anywhere else, he’s completely allowed to be intense and intimidating in a way which is more controlled and deliberate than in any of his previous performances. Here he is playing a giant, cold-hearted killer and every considerable inch of him looks the part. He has the cold, hard stare down to a tee but this physicality is simply a jumping off point. Kuklinski’s real life story (which I’ll get to later) is one full of such contradiction that it’s hard to imagine anyone except Shannon having the bulk and power, combined with the lightness of touch, to manage to portray him as both human and inhuman. Shannon is utterly believable and brings a real genuine gentleness and quiet intensity to the role which holds the film together. He’s helped in this regard by the support of Ryder who is fine as the wife who has no knowledge of her husbands activities and Ray Liotta… well he’s Ray Liotta… he’s playing a mid-level wise guy and as such it’s a role he could play in his sleep. And so, in scenes where he has to play the dominant figure, who intimidates Shannon – which is no easy feat – he manages it with aplomb. In fact the scenes in which Shannon is supplicant to Liotta are some of the best in the film, and the strength of both mens’ performances make it all the more watchable.

Unfortunately, the film is stuck with a director and writer who want to make a straight forward gangster film. Again I’ll explain why I find this so problematic later but even when taken on its own merits as a gangster film The Iceman is less than the sum of its parts. As such, it is only average at best. The film begins with Kuklinski already killing men as though it were as simple a task as buying a pint of milk and already mixed up with low-level mobsters – no attempt is made to explain how any of this occurred. It then moves along at a fair old pace and humanises all of Kuklinski’s actions by focussing on the fact that his wife and family had no clue that he was involved in organised crime or in any kind of violent behaviour. This aspect of the film is actually handled rather well, and the scenes in the family home have a tone of domestic security and genuine warmth that are, at the very least, very watchable.

The gangster aspect is less successful, there is nothing here that we haven’t already seen in films like Donny Brasco, Goodfellas or any host of mid-level wise guy type fair. It’s all too cinematic. The extent to which Kuklinski killed is suggested by montage rather than any real repetitive detail and really the plot regarding how The Iceman rose through the ranks of the mob and how he made a living really isn’t that interesting to begin with – which brings me to why the film is so fatally flawed.

Kuklinski was interviewed for a HBO documentary in 1991 by Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who also interviewed Jeffery Dahmer among others. The documentary The Iceman Tapes – which you can see on YouTube – is utterly dated, occasionally unintentionally funny, fairly terrifying and pitch-blackly comic at the same time. Kuklinski, who was born to abusive parents and whose brother raped and killed a 12 year old girl, saw killing and disposing of bodies as tantamount to killing and disposing of a spider. In a slow New Jersey drawl he unflinchingly describes how he would murder and dismember people who either annoyed him or owed him money. He admits that by his teens he had already killed and severely beaten several people and when the mafia came calling he thought that this was a way to get paid for something he knew he could do. He knew that his ability to kill without emotion was exceptional – that few could manage it and sleep at night. Combined with his detached, almost inhuman attitude towards death, he was also a man mountain, six foot four inches tall and weighing 21 stone. When people describe the type you “wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley” they are describing Kuklinski. It’s hard to imagine a more terrifying human incarnation of death, unless he carried a scythe and wore a cloak. Yet virtually none of this makes it into the film in any meaningful way. Vromen’s film is too concerned with the facts of the case, so to speak, to be bothered with exploring the more interesting story. This man murdered and tortured people day and night and then returned to his wife and children. So little of his working life spilled over into his home life that it was a shock to his family and friends to find out that he had murdered so many. If you consider your day to day life it seems utterly surreal that it is possible to compartmentalise so cleanly. Let’s say you work in an office – chances are some of your day to day stresses come home on your shoulders every evening. Yet this man killed and dismembered humans. It’s mind boggling. Far more than a gangster movie, any film about Kuklinski should deal with his childhood, his early steps into murder and eventually his everyday life as a full time professional killer. His story has, in many ways, more in common with that of a childhood footballing talent who gets spotted by a large club and signed up to play in the big leagues. On the other hand he isn’t a sports man, he’s a murderer. On a daily basis this man kissed his wife and kids goodbye, then went to a shop he had rented and cut up human remains to dispose of them. Either part of this could have made a whole feature in its own right, but unfortunately the film tries to be too “total” in its approach and in its attempt to humanise Kuklinski, it goes a little bit too far. In doing so it’s never quite brutal or lurid enough to be genuinely affecting.

Kuklinski’s life must, in some part, have been part of the genetic make up of the character of Tony Soprano. This unfortunate for the film as The Sopranos is a masterpiece and its exploration of the dichotomous life as criminal and family man is so deep and full that there really is little left to say on the subject. In fact, for a more full exploration of the main themes which should be present in The Iceman, one could simply watch the episodes of The Sopranos entitled College or The Second Coming.

What could and moreover should have been Snowtown meets Goodfellas meets The Brady Bunch, instead comes across as The Departed meets True Lies and it’s a great pity.  Towards the end of the film Shannon plays out a scene which appeared in the documentary. It’s uncanny how close his performance is to the real footage and yet the film version is lit far too cinematically. It does not resemble the source material in any way. This is a fair microcosm of what’s wrong with the film as a whole. Far too mainstream in it’s intentions, too unbalanced, too focussed on the popcorn sales, too hasty, unambitious and too wrapped up in what happened rather than how or why the events transpired. The Iceman never gets under its subjects skin and therefore failed to get under mine in the same meaningful way that the documentary did. This is an average film raised slightly by some excellent performances and yet another brilliant one from Shannon. Perhaps that’s not quite enough to really recommend it, but since it is summer and your only other option may be Will Smith giving life lessons to his snot nosed progeny while CGI pixels go batshit everywhere, a Shannon performance may be the best thing on at your local megaplex.