Skipping ahead a few months or years at a time, punctuated by regular eruptions of blood and gunfire, the picture amounts to more of a highly focused crime yarn than an under-the-skin case study. Business eventually proves lucrative enough for him to move Deborah and their two daughters (McKaley Miller, Megan Sherrill) into a cozy Jersey suburb. Holding down a job with a small-time smut racket (he tells Deborah he dubs Disney cartoons), Richie has no problem slitting the throat of anyone foolish enough to annoy him, a gift that soon places him in the employ of powerful crime boss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta). Predicated on the notion that Kuklinski’s wife and kids were the only people in the world he cared about, the story opens in 1964 with a first date between tough, terse Richie (Shannon) and sweetly unsuspecting Deborah ( Winona Ryder).

Drawn from Anthony Bruno’s 1993 true-crime novel and a 1992 HBO documentary featuring interviews with Kuklinski behind bars (he died there in 2006), the loosely fictionalized script by Vromen and Morgan Land spans roughly two decades, dramatizing not only his grisly day-to-day activities but their gradual toll on his family, an effect comparable to that of slow-drip poison. Dubbed “the Iceman” for his practice of freezing his victims’ bodies so as to confuse the time of death, Kuklinski became an active associate of various East Coast crime families in the late 1950s by conservative estimates, he killed more than 100 people before his arrest in 1986.

Iceman killer instinct