Another great acting turn for the always superb Michael Shannon, some stunning intense moments from the ice-blue eyes of Ray Liotta, a truly icky potrayel by Chris Evans and David Schwimmer and Winona Ryder maybe giving some of the best moments of their careers, still none of this makes Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman worth seeing sorry to say.

There was a very scary documentary I loved as much as was repelled by that first introduced me to Richard Kuklinksi, The Iceman, a mob hit man who lived with his family for years a mere twenty minutes from my house. (Putting his victims on ice after he killed them with various methods, time of death was harder to determine). This movie doesn’t really provide anymore facts than I already knew but I was hoping, as it was a fictionalized account of this truly mysterious man, that maybe I’d come to find some sympathy for Kuklinksi. But I never cared about the guy, never felt his family was in jeopardy even when they started to be.

With a dude as nasty as Kuklinski, you never get to see past the one dimension of the man. I’m not saying Shannon doesn’t do a masterful job here but I don’t think there’s much behind this guy in the first place, nothing to make him interesting really (beyond of course what he does for a living). And maybe because of this, in the end a documentary is all we really need.

The Iceman opens in theaters May 3, 2013.