The Iceman (2013)

I'm not the biggest Michael Shannon fan, but I'm willing to bite the proverbial bullet on this one and admit that he can be pretty darn good, if slightly one-note. I guess when you're playing a remorseless hitman your range might be slightly limited by necessity, but at the very least Shannon was able to make the character of "The Iceman," Richard Kuklinski, come alive to a slightly terrifying degree.

Based on the true story of a mob hitman who was believed to have killed over 100 people, "The Iceman" is a story about a very, very bad man who does very, very bad things without really feeling much about it one way or another. Kuklinski's main deal is that he's a very angry person with little to no control over himself, and tends to solve problems by hurting/killing things. So, when in the late 70's the mob-run porn racket he's working for is shut down, the local mafioso running it (Ray Liotta) decides Kuklinski would make an excellent hitman. He's right about that, and Kuklinski becomes a legendary killer over some 20 years.

I said before that I'm not a huge Michael Shannon fan, and while this hasn't made me a convert or anything I will admit that he's really good in "The Iceman." He's got this great duality going on, where he'll be a stone faced killer one minute, with eyes that look like they're ready to fire lasers out of them, and the next minute he's with his family and that hardness melts away. But there's always those eyes of his that never soften. To paraphrase Robert Shaw, Kuklinski's got dead eyes that don't seem to be living until he shoots you. It's a great performance.

"Is that a gun in your hand or are you just...oh."

Most of the movie is watching Kuklinski brutally kill people with emotionless efficiency, and while it can border on repetitive, it's never so over-the-top as to feel gratuitous. Don't be mistaken, though, the film isn't a highlight reel of gore or anything. In between all of that death is the shocking balancing act that Kuklinski does with his wife and children, who somewhat unbelievably have no idea that he's a mob hitman.

Winona Ryder plays his wife, Barbara, and while it's easy to not like her character simply because she is so dense as to not have any idea what's going on, Ryder is charming and quite believable in the role. She provides a much needed juncture between the two different worlds, and I found her to be charming and I felt really bad for her and her two daughters because we all knew that eventually the jig is going to be up, and Kuklinski is going to be outed as the monster he is.

There's quite a number of celebrity cameos in this, of varying degrees of usefulness and celebrity. David Schwimmer has a decent if slightly hard to buy role as a lowlife mobster, and much like his part in "Band of Brothers" as a drill-sergeant, he actually does a very good job with the exception of being hard to take seriously because he's David freaking Schwimmer. Chris Evans plays a serial killer who gets around in an ice cream truck, which is weird, and James Franco even shows up for about 47 seconds for a single scene in which he has like a dozen lines and then gets shot. But he's James Franco so he got slapped on the DVD cover and has featured billing. Whatever.

Nearly his entire performance is spent cowering. Oh well. Still better than "127 Hours."

A guy who surprised me was Stephen Dorff, whom I didn't even recognize at first since he's rocking a sweet mustache. Like Franco he's got a single scene, but Dorff absolutely tears it up with the short screen time he's given. He's playing Kuklinski's brother who is behind bars for the rape and murder of a young girl, and he begs Richard to help him out and asks for money to hire a better lawyer to hopefully spring him. When Richard refuses, it gets ugly quick, and Dorff is scary intense. In fact it's probably the best acting I've ever seen out of him. I guess I'm just too used to seeing him in Uwe Boll productions to give him much credit.

I know that this isn't a very accurate biography of Richard Kuklinski in many ways. Most of the negativity coming down on it from general consensus concerns the fact that the film skips a lot of important things during his upbringing, and makes him out to be a much nicer guy than he was in real life where his family is concerned. And it's true that the film makes him out to be a caring father who doesn't care for anything else in the world other than his family, when in real life there was literally nothing nice about him at all.

It's like if Mitt Romney and Bruce Campbell merged and then became a cartoon character...

All that being said, "The Iceman" still succeeds as a chilling, rather bleak drama about a professional hitman, even if they're taking liberties with the truth. But hey, that's film, right? That's why it says "Based on a true story." I'm not looking for a documentary with this: I'm looking for a well made film.

Check out the trailer for "The Iceman."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Iceman" is an entertaining crime drama that manages to be both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. While you see horrible things happening throughout, it's nearly impossible to look away. This is mostly due to Michael Shannon's performance, which by itself is worth the price of admission. The dude's eyes can set you on fire from the other end of the room, I swear. This one is worth a look.

Premium Rush (2012)

One of the biggest hazards a motorist faces everyday, especially while driving through a city, is the swarm of pedestrians milling about. Every city has this but there is a certain mindset that exists in the minds of pedestrians in some places that crosses the line from "I have to live and walk around here so please, Mr. Car, give me some space" to the more suicidal "I am going to blindly disregard any and all cars on the road and cross the street whenever and wherever I choose without even looking up."

I live in southeast Michigan very close to a city called Ann Arbor. This is a city where there are laws on the books that literally require a motorist to be a mind reader. I'm not even joking. It's insane. But aside from that, Ann Arbor is home to a collection of absolutely dumb, irritating pedestrians that all seem to have a major death wish. They dart in and out of the street at a moment's notice wherever they feel like. They casually stroll right through a crosswalk in heavy traffic, never so much as bothering to look up to see if the cars are slowing down for them. No, their eyes are firmly set down at either their iPod, texting on their phone or reading a flyer from their favorite head shop. An ambulance could go flying through the intersection with sirens howling, only to have to slam on the brakes for them as they would slowly meander across the street, indignantly sneering "Hey man, I'm walking here!"

It's really the height of arrogance and irresponsibility. It makes driving in Ann Arbor a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions. And the only people worse are the dudes on bicycles. Talk about making drivers nervous and even pedestrians hate you. If they're on the sidewalk they're constantly almost plowing into people coming out of buildings. If they're on the road they're always 3 inches away from a side mirror. And if the car hits them, it's always the driver's fault. Maybe they're under the impression that every driver is Steve McQueen.

So long story short, they made a movie about this most obnoxious form of transportation. And they made the riders of these things the heroes. Sounds like fun.

"Premium Rush" is a film that, just from its very concept, seems to have been tailor made to irritate me. It's a film that portrays these bikers, who I can only describe as absolute assholes, as these rebellious, establishment bucking, X-TREME paragons of "Carpe Diem!" righteousness who struggle every day to get out from under the cruel, oppressive thumb of both The Man and innocent motorists. It seems like a movie concept straight out of the 90's, when anyone who "played by the rules" was a blustering, dead-on-the-inside, totally un-tubular, most bogus pawn of The System, harrumphing at the shear outrageousness of it all with monocle popping shock.

Go to bed, old man!

Our heroes are bike messengers in New York City, a place that I'd rather eviscerate myself with a tire pump than live in. When fax machines or email doesn't work, or you need a package delivered immediately, you get these guys on bikes to deliver it for you. They do this quickly by blatantly breaking every traffic law you can imagine and riding their bikes suicidally at top speed in busy streets, undoubtedly causing far more accidents than would normally happen on any given day. Whether or not this is a real thing, I'm not sure, but I'm assuming it is. Although I can't imagine how a business like that could operate considering they would be in a constant state of being SUED UP THE ASS. I don't even want to imagine the insurance.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is our hero, Wilee. Yes, like the coyote. They actually make that reference in the movie. Now, I do love me some JGL, but here he feels wasted. It's not that he does a bad job or anything, but the character of Wilee is so uninteresting to me. Really, he rides bikes and that's about it. He's also got this twisted philosophy about refusing to have any brakes on his bike. "Brakes kill" as he puts it.

I'm not sure what his rationale for that sentiment is, but it makes just as little sense in the movie world as in the real world, as there is in fact a moment near the end where he almost dies in a situation in which a set of brakes might have very well prevented him from getting thrown over top of a cab to the bone-crunching pavement below. He brakes some ribs as a result. And is there anything to be taken away from that lesson?

NOPE!

The film actually seems to reward not having any brakes, even when bad things happen as a result of it. Immediately after getting out of the ambulance (and not even getting treatment for his shattered ribs or anything), he's still going around full blast with no ability to stop. The injuries he received, which would normally mean barely being able to breathe, doesn't even slow him down. I'll leave that at bad script writing, but even his girlfriend, fellow bike messenger Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), after stupidly plowing headfirst into a car, decides that it was the brakes' fault instead of hers and ditches them. Why do they hate brakes so much? They probably prevented her from greater injury since she was going at a slower speed when she wiped her own damn self out. And I would think being able to stop is a particularly good thing when they're flying around the streets of Manhattan, weaving in and out of heavy traffic like an especially intense game of Frogger.

Somehow I don't think they're physics majors. You see, Newton's Third Law states that for every action...you know what? Screw it. Hit the pavement harder. See what I care.

The whole point of the movie is that JGL gets a package to deliver, and this crooked, clearly insane cop played by Michael Shannon is after it. He owes the Chinese mob or somebody money, and the package is a voucher for a lot of cash. That's the setup, but all it really boils down to is watching bikes weave in and out of traffic like a bunch of suicidal tools, causing untold amounts of collateral damage in car accidents and injuries to innocent drivers.

"Your whiplash and concussion means nothing next to my sense of freedom, you sheep!"

Let's talk about Michael Shannon for a minute, though. I thought I'd seen some annoying, really hammy bad guys in the past. I had not seen Michael Shannon in "Premium Rush." What his performance is, in its simplest essence, is what would happen if Stephen Dorff did a line of cocaine 3 feet long, imitated Dennis Quaid on his worst acting day, and then did the whole thing quacking in a bad Edward G. Robinson impression. He was terrible. And this little "Nyah" interjection he kept saying almost like a vocal tick was enough to send me up the walls. Also, his character is an idiot. And it's hard to have an intimidating villain when he's a complete and utter moron.

I think someone smashed Ray Liotta's and Thomas Haden Church's faces together. Then melted it.

This is a film made entirely of annoying characters, now that I think about it. JGL is annoying because his character is an arrogant, self-entitled jackass who doesn't believe in the laws of physics. His girlfriend is annoying because she really doesn't do anything relevant to the plot except tag along. Michael Shannon is Michael Shannon. Wolé Parks as fellow messenger and Wilee rival Manny is your average loud-mouthed "Aw, HELL naw," borderline comic relief character who ends up being a bigger villain than Michael Shannon simply because he's being a dick and wants to steal JGL's girlfriend. By doing that he's seriously a greater menace to JGL than Michael Shannon is. Again, what a phenomenal villain.

Also, JGL has this thing that he does where every time he nearly causes an accident at an intersection by flying through it, he looks back and gives this deranged, manic giggle.

What a dick.

Even "Daily Show" veteran Aasif Mandvi was annoying as JGL's boss. Although I guess if there was a character in "Premium Rush" that was actually a little bit funny and kind of likeable it was him. But the man can't do it all on his own. Between being in this and "The Last Airbender" it seems his agent doesn't like him very much.

So did "Premium Rush" do anything right? Well, I suppose if I were going to be generous I'd comment on the fact that the bike riding is reasonably well filmed, if a little overly stylized at parts. This style thing came into play in particular with one thing that I'm still not entirely sure if I liked or not. This thing being that whenever JGL gets in a situation where he hits a dangerous spot in traffic, the movie slows down and we see every potential possibility of the route he could take with big yellow arrows, each one ending in a horrible crash until he finds the way that will allow him to zip through traffic like a jackass without plowing into a car or truck or baby stroller. Of course, the cars behind him will probably get into accidents as a result of what he's doing, but who cares, right? He's our hero!

Oh by the way, these big yellow arrows? TOTALLY not part of the blatant GPS advertisement going on in this movie. Totally not.

And I must also commend "Premium Rush" on educating me on the fact that apparently, China only sends out one ship across the sea. Ever. That ship that sails out of China at 7 PM New York time (which apparently is the middle of the day in China despite the 12 hour time difference. Yeah, oops.) is going to be the last boat to leave for the rest of time. Why do I know this? Well I have to assume it is since JGL is forced to risk life and limb to get the money to its location by 7 PM so that this lady's son can get on the boat. I mean, why would that lady risk not only her life, but the lives of a number of other people if that weren't the case? It's not like he could just take another boat later or something, right? She wouldn't do that just so she could see him sooner, especially since she's already waited a few years already, while the kid is evidently in good hands, right? That would just make her a terrible bitch.

No, it's cool that people are dead as a direct result of your kid needing to get on that boat RIGHT THE HELL NOW. I'm sure he'll thank you when he's old enough to comprehend that.

And naturally there's also the issue of not only the voucher, but the entire involvement of JGL and every other character in the movie being an unnecessary moot point to an overly complicated system. Giving a person a ticket, drawing a smiley face on it and telling them they need to bring it to these people there by this time seems awfully stupid and complex when you could have done something like USE A CELL PHONE TO TELL YOUR PEOPLE THAT PERSON IS PAID UP AND IT'S ALL GOOD TO GO.

Isn't it great when the entire cast and story is superfluous?

THE BOTTOM LINE - I guess bike nerds would like "Premium Rush" by default, but it isn't a good movie. In fact I'd call it obnoxious, but that factors in with my personal gripes with people who think traffic laws only exist to oppress them. But even from a film standpoint, unless you're an absurd fan of X-TREME biking, I seriously can't think of a single reason to recommend it.