Roy ultimately discovers that Richard is working without his permission and comes calling. The two experiment with using cyanide spray as an undetectable murder weapon inside a nightclub. Freezy (an unrecognizable Chris Evans), who drives an ice cream truck and freezes the bodies of his victims before disposing of them. When mob politics interrupt the relationship with Roy, Richard teams up with another contract killer, Robert Pronge, a k a Mr. Richard’s fortunes quickly rise (he tells Deborah he is working on Wall Street), and the Kuklinskis move to a comfortable home in the suburbs and have two daughters. Impressed by Richard’s composure with a gun pointed at him, Roy enlists him as his personal hit man. Richard’s opportunities expand when Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta), a crime lord flanked by two minions, Josh Rosenthal (David Schwimmer) and Mickey Scicoli (John Ventimiglia), visits his shabby studio and threatens his life for being late on a delivery.
Ryder gives her deepest screen performance in years. Playing a slavishly devoted wife who refuses to face the truth even when it stares her in the face, Ms. The first sign of his terrifying possessiveness and rage is his murder of a bar patron who makes a crude remark about Deborah. Richard is bootlegging pornographic movies for the Mafia when he marries Deborah Pellicotti (Winona Ryder), whom he meets in the early 1960s and woos by telling her she “is prettier than Natalie Wood.” She thinks that he makes his living dubbing Disney cartoons.
#Who is the iceman killer movie#
The movie was shot in Shreveport, La., which convincingly doubles for New York and New Jersey.
Estimates of the number of his victims range from 100 to 250. He was convicted of many contract killings for various New York-area crime organizations in 1988. The real-life Kuklinski claimed to have committed his first murder as a young teenager. Its story is based on Anthony Bruno’s novel, “The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer,” and the 1992 HBO documentary, “The Iceman Tapes: Conversations With a Killer.” Where “The Sopranos” and its close cinematic equivalent, “Goodfellas,” are warmblooded explorations of violent men bonding, “The Iceman,” directed by Ariel Vromen from a screenplay he wrote with Morgan Land, is as cold as the nickname of its title character. Richard is so secretive that late in the movie when mobsters pay him an unannounced house call, he is dismayed to discover that they know the exact location of his home in suburban New Jersey. He is a seething loner, and although not as bright, sociable or complicated as James Gandolfini’s Tony, the two have one crucial similarity: Both are fiercely devoted family men who go to great lengths to shield their loved ones from the dirty reality of their work. Richard operates in the treacherous milieu of Tony Soprano, but in an earlier era: the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Shannon brought to the role of a man driven half-mad by apocalyptic portents in “Take Shelter.” It is a performance that has the same life-or-death gravity Mr. But in its tiniest tremors you can sense explosive forces roiling below the mask and grasp the duality with a visceral feeling of dread. You can’t really see through Richard, whose pale-blue eyes take in the world from a face as expressionless as a sphinx. In “The Iceman” Michael Shannon’s mesmerizing portrayal of Richard Kuklinski, a notorious contract killer, has the paradoxical quality, peculiar to many great screen performances, of being unreadable and transparent.