Movies like “The Iceman” will always remind you of the other, better, movies that inspired them. Your “Scarfaces”, “Goodfellas”, ect. They want to bring you back to a time and place, want to revel in the tough guy dialogue, love the grittiness of ideas like leading double lives and murder for the sake of living the American dream. I love these movies, and there probably aren’t many who don’t. But the best of them are great rise and fall stories or great character studies. “The Iceman” falls short because there is nothing to study.
