Michael Shannon is one of my favourite actors. He embodies the roles he's given with a captivating intensity and authenticity - with a gritty stillness that projects a heightened realism. We'd expect to see him at his best, then, as the starring role in a hitman drama based on the true story of contract killer Richard Kuklinski. This should be an opportunity for Shannon to beautifully deliver a character with the psychological complexities of a man desperately bound to his family and simultaneously bound to the job of a ruthless murderer. And in observing his strikingly statuesque face for an hour and a half we certainly see Shannon do the best job he can with what he's given. But my problem is that he's not given enough in the script, or at least not surrounded with a cohesive enough group of supporting elements to make his character work.

It took me most of the film to decide what it was that stopped this story from being delivered to its full potential. And I came to the conclusion that its main route is in the film's confusion and incompleteness. Vromen needed to decide whether he was creating a gritty and distinctively styled film with the air of an independent, or a quick-paced Hollywood thriller. It glimpsed moments of both, some shots overflowing with the gripping effects of the cold and stylish cinematography of films like Cianfrance's Blue Valentine or González Iñárritu's Biutiful, while others screamed generic techniques and skills learnt in film school. I've seen the shot of two benches on a seafront plenty of times, and it can work in the film that remains consistent in this style throughout. But The Iceman does not.

This isn't helped when moments with the potential to stop the audience from breathing - to punch their heartbeats out of control - are heavily diluted into pitiful rather than powerful simply because of the soundtrack. I found the soundtrack over-dramatic and frustrating. It would have worked if Volrem had stuck to the swift, smooth style of the big Hollywood movie. But this film desperately wanted to become more modest, still, and in fact fiercely powerful. Silence, only a character's breath, a tapping of the foot, all would have shone with much more poignancy in these scenes than the soundtrack allowed.

The script simply needed more actual conversation. The film's subject matter is asking to be placed amongst mesmerizingly dense, lifelike dialogue. The script fails to answer to this, instead ticking the boxes of 'hitman' lingo, providing enough words to tell us that specific characters have specifically important relationships. But it does this on the most simplistic level, refusing to go into any captivating depth. We are left relying on Shannon's beautiful face, and the skilfully directed interaction between him and his wife, played brilliantly by Winona Ryder, to discover anything emotionally complex. This would have been apt had there been a purposeful lack of dialogue - a silent intensity that told us more than anything spoken could. But voices still filled the screen in true thriller fashion, giving the film a superficiality that made it suffer. It just failed to provide any depth. Perhaps the desire to remain true to a real story is to blame for this, distracting from the aim of making a truly stunning film, and instead reminding me of those stories in musicals, tenuously strung together by Queen and ABBA songs. And maybe this ironically prevented the film from depicting the true story with the power it deserves. 

I picture a great film out of this story, but it's not quite there in Vromen's work. The Iceman feels more like work-in-progress than a fully cohesive, consistently gripping crime drama.