There once was a stone-cold contract killer who was also a loving family man, whose two personas happily coexisted until the killer was arrested: that’s The Iceman in a nutshell. This should be a pressure-cooker of a crime thriller, or a nuanced character study that examines a man living a life of contradictions. Instead, Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman, loosely based on the life of infamous Mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski, never seems to get beyond the basics, leaving the viewer cold.

Which is a shame, considering the juicy material Vromen had to work with. Kuklinski killed well over 100 people as a contract killer for the DeCavalcante and Gambino crime families in New Jersey and New York from the late 1960s until his arrest in 1986. He earned his nickname “The Iceman” by freezing the bodies of his victims for months before dumping them, confusing the time of death and keeping the police at bay for over a decade. His wife and children knew nothing of his “career” until the AFT bust; that Kuklinski kept his home and work lives so thoroughly separate is compelling. Vromen has amassed an impressive crew of supporting actors to bring 1970s New Jersey to life: Winona Ryder, Chris Evans, David Schwimmer and the omnipresent James Franco—not that you’d recognize most of them underneath all that hair (the biggest crime here might be Evans’ greasy locks and mutton chops). Ray Liotta and John Ventimiglia also appear, to lend some mob drama cred.

But the glacial pacing of the first half dilutes rather than builds the tension, and a talented cast can’t save the dialogue, which ranges from painfully awkward to boilerplate wise-guy talk. We see Kuklinski (Michael Shannon) court Debra (Ryder) and start a family, interspersed with scenes of violence and murder. Shortly after tenderly cradling his infant daughter, he impresses Roy DeMeo (Liotta) with his cool demeanor and efficient killing of a homeless man on command, starting his career as an assassin.

We see what happens, but there’s no emotional resonance. A few brief scenes shed narrow rays of light into Kuklinski’s mindset: a visit with his incarcerated brother (“You and me, Richie, we’re too f***ed in the head for family.”), a flashback to an abusive childhood, Kuklinski’s credo to not kill women or children. Still, beneath Shannon’s blank façade, there appears to be no discordance between the doting husband and father and the remorseless killer. The audience is left as numb as The Iceman himself seems to be.

The film is not without its bright spots. Liotta reliably fills the shoes of a hard-bitten mob boss, and Evans brings a slick, dark humor to his role as Mr. Freezy, a free-agent hitman who operates out of an ice cream truck. Things start to heat up during the second half of the film, as mistakes are made, dangerous people get nervous and Kuklinski’s double lives head toward collision. But so much falls flat, especially the scenes with his family, which feel insincere, and show Debra to be shockingly gullible and incurious—such ignorance, willful or otherwise, completely negates any need for the Iceman to cover his tracks, robbing the film of another opportunity for tension.

The Iceman is modestly effective as a mobster flick, offering enough grit, spit and Mafia patois to satisfy viewers still pining over the demise of The Sopranos. But as an exploration of one of the most notorious hitmen of the New York and New Jersey ganglands, it just can’t seem to scratch the surface.

Author Bio:

Nancy Lackey Shaffer is a contributing writer at Highbrow Magazine.