Dir. Troy Duffy USA 2009
It's always strange revisiting something you were obsessed with in your youth. Some things hold up. Others are better left in the past, forever remembered through the hazy lens of time and lower standards. I was about 15 years old when my older cousin told me about The Boondock Saints. The film had been set for release in 1999, but like Fight Club, American Psycho and a number of other better films, it's success was derailed by the Columbine shooting in April of '99. Released on a limited number of screens, the film was a critical and commercial flop, but eventually found a substantial cult audience on DVD among men ages 15 to 35. My best friend and I bought the DVD on my cousin's recommendation and literally watched it twice in a row. It ended, we looked at each other, nodded, and hit play again. By the end of our senior year, just about every guy at our high school had seen the movie. Everyone knew the prayer by heart. It was kind of a big deal. I probably watched this movie a least a dozen times during my senior year. As of a week ago, I hadn't seen it in about 5 or 6 years. Despite my immense disappointment upon revisiting the film (which, frankly, I was expecting), I am glad to have grown enough as a person in the intervening years that I no longer identify with it.
I'm sure most guys in my age demographic have seen this movie some time in the last decade, but if you haven't, the plot unfolds thusly: Murphy and Connor McManus are fraternal twins/Irish immigrants living a crappy (yet glorified) working class existence in Boston. Following a deadly bar fight with a group of Russian mobsters and a subsequent vision from God to eradicate evil men from the world, the McManus brothers team up with their buddy Rocco, a Mafia delivery boy, to wipe out crime in Boston, Punisher-style. Arriving to assist the inept Boston PD in apprehending the brothers is flamboyant FBI agent Paul Smecker, played with gusto by Willem Dafoe. Tons of gratuitous violence ensues.
Even as a naive 15 year old, I was able to recognize that The Boondock Saints was just a Tarantino-esque pastiche of extreme violence, witty pop culture reference, overt religious symbolism (or should I say "symbology") and fractured chronology. At the same time, its scrappy DIY aesthetic and endlessly mugging sense of self-import struck a cord with a teenager who was excited to be on the front lines of an cult classic in the making. I don't begrudge my past self his enjoyment of the film (nor anyone elses), but upon revision, this film suffers for a number of reasons.
In case you didn't know, the primary reason behind the ten year gap between this movie and its sequel was the incredibly poor judgement of its writer/director Troy Duffy. As detailed in the documentary Overnight, Duffy's script were plucked from obscurity by Harvey Weinstein and Duffy himself was given a $15 million budget and near-complete control over the production of the film. His gross mismanagement of the profits the film generated, as well as his raging ego, obliterated any goodwill the film's underground success generated for him and ten years later, his finally making Boondock II feels more like an act of desperation rather than one of triumph. Knowing now what there is to know about Duffy, its extremely easy to see both his ego and general douchebaggery writ large across every aspect of the film itself. Beyond being derivative of Pulp Fiction, The Punisher and everything in between, the film almost cries out to be edited by an impartial observer, or at the very least, someone with good taste. For example, the opening credits play out over a scene in which the boys are working at their job at a meat-packing plant (because they're BLUE COLLAR) and are required to show the ropes to a new employee, a monstrous lesbian who proceeds to quickly take offense at Connor's use of the phrase 'rule of thumb' and kick him in the nuts. She is then felled in one punch by Murphy. Even if we ignored the fact that that's offensively stupid and granted that it's funny in principle, the entire sequence is inter-cut with shots of the Boston skyline, to the point that the conversation the characters are having is broken up line by line, completely throwing off any comedic timing the scene could hope to have. Here, look for yourself. See? That's where an editor should say "this isn't funny, it needs to be changed". Incidentially, for a movie that uses the story of Kitty Genovese as the first (and pretty much only) argument for its moral thesis, this film seems completely incapable of showing any woman the slightest ounce of respect. Literally every woman in the film who has a line of dialogue is physically or verbally abused in some way. Real classy there, Troy.
In retrospect, it is a bit difficult to see why I found this film funny or exciting in the first place. The action is poorly directed and makes the mistake of using slow motion to cover it up (that just makes it worse) and most of the humor comes from the character of Rocco, the brothers dim-witted sidekick, who is pretty much just an unfiltered mouthpiece for Duffy's tough guy bullshit. The brothers themselves fair slighly better. Sean Patrick Flannery does a decent enough job as Connor, but Norman Reedus (who may have one of the worst Irish accents I've ever heard) never really gets the hang of Duffy's unwieldy dialogue (which combines the pretentiousness of Tarantino's with the clumsy verbosity of Kevin Smith's, but lacks the charm of either) and sounds like he's reading it off cue cards half the time. Also Ron Jeremy's in it. His acting's about as good as you'd expect.
Indeed, the one bright spot in the film is Willem Dafoe, who manages to bring nuance and life to the mincing stereotype that is Agent Paul Smecker. I'm sure Duffy thought he was being incredibly progressive by including a competent gay character that thinks "cuddling is for fags", but Dafoe manages to work around Duffy's obliviousness and create a few moments that are still laugh-out-loud funny. And I guess the brothers prayer is pretty cool too. And Billy Connolly, who's in it for about 5 minutes.
I'm a bit surprised at how vicious this review has become so far. I'd have been better served saving some of my vitrol for the second film, which is significantly worse than the first. The second film finds the brothers returning from an exile in Ireland eight years after the events of the first film in order to avenge the murder of a priest. For starters, the beginning of the film doesn't jive with the ending of the first at all. At the end of the first film, they execute a Mafia boss in a crowded court room, declaring that they are going to take to the streets and never stop hunting down criminals and scum. A news report at the beginning of the second film claims that they disappeared after that incident and haven't been heard of since. What the fuck. Also, (and this is a bit superficial, but whatever) while Norman Reedus looks like he hasn't aged a day, the years have not been kind to Sean Patrick Flannery. Did he get plastic surgery or something? He looks like a completely different person.
It seems like Troy Duffy wanted to adhere to the usual 'bigger is better' maxim of sequels here, but that somehow got turned into 'remake the first movie, but change all the small details'. Instead of an Italian sidekick, they have a Mexican sidekick! (Now they get to say spic instead of guinea!) Instead of Willem Dafoe as a stereotypically gay investgator who listens to opera to focus on crime scenes, they have Julie Benz as a stereotypically Southern investigator who uses earplugs to focus on crime scenes! They're hunting the son of the Mafia boss from the previous film! There's even a scene in which they are saved by rope. Remember that? From the first one?
I will give special mention to Julie Benz who, while not a particularly strong actress, is someone I've always found charming and am happy to see in just about anything. Duffy shows surprising restrain in her costume design and the character would almost qualify as not ridiculous if she weren't a carbon copy of Dafoe's character from the first film. Also her belt-buckle gun holster looked really stupid. And jesus, that accent...
Throw in a downright embarrassing cameo by a respected veteran actor at the end (spoil it for yourself on IMDB if you like) and this thing was pretty much a complete shitfest. The only slightly redeeming performance in it is by Clifton Collins Jr. as their new sidekick. The fact that he's an actual actor allows him to bring a loopy sort of cartoon-character vibe to the part, putting him miles ahead of the annoying douchebag who played Rocco in the first one (Incidentally, Rocco reappears for a dream sequence in this film which basically amounts to a rejected Denis Leary stand-up routine and is, not to wear out the word, embarrassingly bad).
I actually didn't have as much fun writing this review as I thought I would. It's always a little heartbreaking when things you loved as a kid don't hold up to your standards as an adult. And I suppose one could accuse me of being an elitist douche with no sense of humor with regards to my review of these movies. But I'm sure Troy Duffy would agree that brutal honesty is a valuable characteristic of any manly man, from Duke Wayne on down. So believe I'm being honest when I say, Troy Duffy, that you are a shitty filmmaker.
UP NEXT: Two separate films by the guys who made Training Day: writer David Ayer's Street Kings and director Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest. After that, I promise I'll review something that doesn't suck. Not that these will, necessarily.
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