“I don’t have to think about it,” Shannon’s Kuklinski says in The Iceman, when someone inquires about his ruthless killing. Perhaps the Grim Reaper he had tattooed on his arm said it all. He wasn’t inclined to discuss his actions, even less to engage in introspection. Perhaps it’s expecting too much to want answers for the abhorrent behaviour of Kuklinski, a former Roman Catholic altar boy, the son of Polish and Irish immigrants. Kuklinski also professes love for the two daughters (McKaley Miller and Megan Sherrill) that he has with Deborah, without demonstrating much of that avowed affection. While Shannon delivers another of his sturdy performances, and Winona Ryder ably serves as Kuklinski’s naïve wife Deborah, one of the few people on Earth whom he loved, the film trudges through its grim task of showing dirty deeds done without conscience or much context. Richard Kuklinski also known as THE ICEMAN is America’s most famous and deadliest Serial Killer of all time. The script penned by the Israeli-born Vromen with Morgan Land offers few insights into Kuklinski’s psychic makeup or motivations and even less reason to care about them. What we don’t get is the “why,” a limitation also found in Ariel Vromen’s emotionally arid The Iceman, in which Michael Shannon plays Kuklinski.

This certainly serves as the “what” for contract killer Richard Kuklinski, a |New Jersey serial killer turned mob hitman who died in jail in 2006 after coldly admitting to at least 100 murders and possibly as many as 250. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines a sociopath as “a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behaviour and a lack of conscience.” After being found guilty of the charges against him in connection to the deaths of Gary Smith and Daniel Deppner, Richard pleaded guilty to George Malliband and Louis Masgay’s murders in 1988. Starring Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, Ray Liotta and Chris Evans. Image Credit: HBO/The Iceman Tapes: Conversations with a Killer.

Whos the iceman killer