THE ICEMAN

Meet the loving father who makes the Godfather look like a pussycat
barry-normanBWTruth can indeed be stranger than fiction, although how much actual truth there is in a film which, like this one, describes itself as ‘based on fact’ is always open to doubt.

Still, of one thing we can be sure: Richard Kuklinski was a very bad man. As a contract killer from the 1960s into the 1980s he murdered more than 100 people, usually for money but occasionally just because it seemed convenient at the time.

We swiftly learn how bad he is when, after an opening scene of gentle, clumsy courtship in a coffee shop with his future wife Deborah (Winona Ryder) he casually slits the throat of a man who has made a slighting comment about her.

And that’s where Kuklinski is so remarkable: even as he slaughters total strangers he is at the same time a devoted husband and father. As he says himself, Deborah and their two daughters are the only people he cares about ‘in the whole f***ing world’ and his actions make that clear.

Kuklinski, a big, lumbering Polish-American, is played in a deeply powerful performance by Michael Shannon. At the beginning he has a comparatively humble job bootlegging porno movies for the Mob while telling Deborah he dubs Disney cartoons for a living.

Then he comes to the attention of local Mafia boss Ray Liotta who, impressed by his fearlessness and ice-cold eyes, hires him as his personal hit man. This is far more lucrative. Kuklinski tells his wife he’s now in finance, the family moves to a nice house in a New Jersey suburb and he goes about his nefarious business in a suit.

Things begin to unravel, however, when Liotta offends a more powerful Mafia capo, has to lie low for a while and temporarily makes Kuklinski redundant, though forbidding him to work for anyone else.

But the Iceman needs the money so he teams up with another hit man, Mr Freezy – an unrecognisable Chris Evans (no, not the ginger radio bloke; the one who plays Captain America), who freezes their joint victims in his ice-cream van before later chopping them up for disposal. Liotta is very displeased, to put it mildly, and Kuklinski, now out of favour, has to watch out for his own safety and that of his family.

This is not a flamboyant Mafia movie like The Godfather or GoodFellas; instead, director Ariel Vromen adopts a cool, matter-of-fact approach, which makes the contrast between the psychopathic killer and his alter ego as loving husband and dad even more vivid.

Shannon is terrific, cold and unemotional, except where his family is concerned or in occasional fits of violent temper, and the rest of the cast is on excellent form, too.

One question is left unanswered though: how much did Deborah really know about Kuklinski’s trade? Apparently nothing, but surely a wife would have to be very gullible indeed to accept that her blue-collar spouse could go virtually overnight from cartoon dubber to financial wizard without wondering how come.