A reference in their dialogue together about having had it tough growing up, and a flashback to their father dispensing punishment with a belt, seems meant to answer any distracting questions the viewers might bring to the table about just how these guys could have gotten so screwed up.Īlthough Richard seems to have always had a killer’s instincts, he might never have made money off it if Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta), the gangster who oversees the distribution of his porno films, hadn’t gotten his schedule confused and visited him on the wrong night and then blame Richard for a delivery not being ready. He tells Ryder that his favorite job was Cinderella.) Richard also has a brother – played briefly but memorably by Steven Dorff – who is in prison, and who Richard has nothing but contempt for, because the brother killed a little girl.
(He tells his bride-to-be that he works dubbing Disney cartoons, a detail that suggests a livelier imagination, and more of a sense of humor, than anything he ever gets to say or do again would suggest. Shannon plays Richard Kuklinski, a colorless but intense dude who, in 1964, is courting Winona Ryder and dealing in pornographic films.
Comedy bit about the iceman killer professional#
Michael Shannon and Ray Liotta in The IcemanĪfter watching Michael Shannon – the Method Dwight Frye of our times – straining to pop not only his eyes but every vein in his head as the dark embodiment of helpless, neurotic super-villainy in Man of Steel, it’s kind of relaxing getting to see him settle down and play a regular, run-of-the-mill cold-blooded professional assassin, with a hundred kills to his credit, in the true-crime docudrama The Iceman.