Ariel Vromen‘s The Iceman just had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and now the first trailer has arrived as Millennium Films went and picked it up without me knowing. The first reviews appear to be mixed right out of the gate as Vromen enlists Michael Shannon to star in the titular role as Richard Kuklinski, a mob hitman believed to have killed 100 people between 1964 and 1986.
The film co-stars Chris Evans, Winona Ryder, Ray Liotta, David Schwimmer, Robert Davi, Christa Campbell and James Franco.
Over at The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney writes:
There’s considerable overlap here with crime sagas from Goodfellas to The Sopranos, and though his film is certainly not quite up there with the classics of Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, Vromen paints from his own palette. In tone, The Iceman perhaps most closely resembles the early work of James Gray in its neo-noir edginess and contagious fascination with the dourest and most dangerous of milieus. One of its most bracing characteristics, established from the outset, is the fluid juxtaposition of tenderness and violence.
At The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw also finds a Goodfellas comparison, citing the film in his opening paragraph alongside David Fincher’s Zodiac:
Zodiac meets Goodfellas in Ariel Vroman’s movie about America’s most notorious mob hitman: Richie Kuklinski, a stone-cold assassin who whacked more than 100 people during four decades. It’s a grisly and unedifying tale in which a somewhat typecast Michael Shannon gives a stolid, unsmiling performance as the psycho killer himself – truly, the guy who put the “dead” in “deadpan”.
What’s that? You want another Goodfellas comparison? Well, in the most negative of the three reviews I looked at Oliver Lyttelton at The Playlist writes:
Are we living in a post-gangster movie age? From the early talkies to the Oscar-winning success of The Departed, the genre has been ever-popular and responsible for seminal films from White Heat and The Godfather to Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction. But one struggles to think of a standout film in the genre since Scorsese’s Oscar winner, with memorable mobsters now coming from television rather than the movies. We’re sure that someone will come along and give the form new life one of these days, but that reinvention of the wheel doesn’t come from Ariel Vroman’s The Iceman, which is decent enough, but fails to cover ground that hasn’t already been covered many times before.
With that information at your side check out the first trailer directly below.
