![]() (James Franco has a cameo as one of his more luckless victims -a funny face to see in this context, though the moment isn’t at all played for laughs.) But the dulling effect of these steady bursts of violence wears off during the consistently fine scenes between Richie and the family he treats with alternating brutality and tenderness. The Iceman could have benefited from some modulation in its middle hour-there are a few too many unvarying, context-free scenes of Richie doing away with people in horrible, heartless ways. But Roy isn’t happy about his former employee straying to greener criminal pastures-and these guys don’t inhabit a moral world where threatening to take out someone’s entire family is anywhere near over the line. ![]() As time goes by he falls in with other criminal accomplices, most notably an eccentric freelance hitman (an excellent, bearded-beyond-recognition Chris Evans) who operates out of an ice cream truck that doubles as dead-body storage. Incredibly, Richie manages to keep his day job a secret all that time, passing himself off as a “currency trader” to explain the sudden influxes of cash. ![]() The story stretches over the course of decades, as the Kuklinskis have two daughters and settle into a comfortable life in the New Jersey suburbs. Richie has a job bootlegging porno movies for the crime boss Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta), but when Roy has occasion to notice his employee’s skill at cold-blooded murder, he hires Richie as an all-purpose hit man. ![]() ![]() On one of their first dates, Richie ducks into the alley of a pool hall to casually slit the throat of a guy who crossed him earlier in the evening, establishing for the audience just who we’re dealing with here. where he’s courting his wife-to-be, Deborah (Winona Ryder). We meet the miserable bastard in 1964 in Jersey City, N.J. ![]()
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