“Pray to God,” Kuklinski tells one victim. Shannon makes Kuklinski stoic and quiet - a guy who never talks about his methods, even when he hooks up with a hipper version of himself, played with manic verve by Chris Evans ( Captain America). The Iceman is best compared to GoodFellas, and it isn’t a coincidence that here Liotta has his best screen role since the earlier film. Therefore, he’l l never become “a made man,” a genuine “goodfella.” He becomes “the Polack,” a reliable killer for the Jersey mob who isn’t Italian. He knows his place - which keeps him alive when Demeo and his lieutenants (David Schwimmer among them) jerk him around. The Iceman establishes that the guy had a temper long before he became a contract killer. And, when mobster Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta) orders it, Kuklinski has no more compunction about killing for money than he does about making porn. In The Iceman, Michael Shannon has the voice and face of a mass murderer, a man who can tell his soon-to-be-wife (Winona Ryder), “I dub cartoons for a living” - when in reality he duplicates porn films for the mob.
The real-life monster, a poker-faced family man from New Jersey, carried out coldblooded mob killings for more than a decade.The killings didn’t encompass any glamour - or sexual or sadistic glee on his part.They resulted simply from work - a cold calculation of who had to die and how the death could be achieved without getting caught. Richard Kuklinski could stand as the poster child for the banality of evil. The phrase “banality of evil” was used when historians tried to explain the bland men and women who perpetrated the Holocaust, and when critics sought ways to describe the often-dull villains who didn’t hold much interest apart from their crimes.