The Iceman (2012)

The Iceman arrives with the grim efficiency of its subject. Ariel Vromen's 2012 picture follows Richard Kuklinski, the New Jersey contract killer who spent two decades murdering for the mob while his wife and daughters believed he worked in currency trading. Michael Shannon plays him with a coiled stillness that suggests a man holding a door shut against something large and unpleasant. The film has no interest in explaining him, and less interest in redeeming him. It simply watches.

This is a crime drama of the old school, assembled from familiar parts: the pool-hall throat slashing, the cyanide, the suburban house paid for in cash, the undercover sting. The supporting cast is a wall of recognizable faces doing recognizable work. Winona Ryder has little to do but look trusting. Ray Liotta glowers. Chris Evans, cast against type, glowers differently. Nobody in the film pauses to deliver a speech about the state of the world, and nobody was asked to. The screenplay treats organized murder as a business and a temperament, which is what it was.

What the film offers instead of a message is a mood, and a performance. Shannon's Kuklinski is a man whose rage leaks out in small, ugly increments, and the film is most alive when it lets him sit in a room and be quietly wrong. The reviews at the time were mixed, the box office was worse, and the whole enterprise has the air of a project that knew exactly what it was and made no apology for it. There is something almost restful in that. A film can simply be about a killer, and this one is.