Sydney Film Festival http://www.sff.org.au/films-container/the-iceman/

My second shoot-em-up of this festival. The star of this film with a strong performance in the leading role is Michael Shannon. He has a lot of bad hair days, but then again so do most of the cast as it is set in the era of bad hair (1960s-1980s). This makes actors like David Schwimmer, Stephen Dorf and Chris Evans barely recognisable. Winona Ryder plays his largely ignorant, but not quite long-suffering wife. Michael’s character Richie is a contract killer and is based on a real-life serial murderer and Mafia hitman, Richard Kuklinski. Kuklinski is said to have executed over 100 individuals. It is a pretty violent journey, set mostly in New Jersey and New York.

Unfortunately the film loses one star for taking far too long to give James Franco any screen time and then it limits it by having him killed after only a couple of minutes, mostly spent on his knees praying in vain. Having a hit put on James Franco is simply unforgivable.

The two other amazing things in this story are: the amount of time it took for the police to catch up with him and that his wife and daughters (in the film) seemed to be completely unaware of his “profession” until the very end.

So, between the bad hair and the Franco fiasco, I can only give this one 3.5/5