The Boondock Saints B-

On DVD, 1999, Rated R, 110 minutes
Boondock Saints was released in 1999 to small fanfare and a smaller box office. Video gave it a second life, and it has subsequently developed a cult following among the current college-age set. With the recent announcement of a 2009 sequel, I decided it was time to see what the fuss was about.

So, here’s the scoop: the film follows the life of the McManus brothers, Irish Catholic fraternal twins, in Boston as they run up against and then get swept into an Italian mob/Russian mob turf war after a bar fight turns decidedly nasty, leaving a couple Russian gangsters dead (in novel style, I might add) and the twins in possession of a mobster’s pager (remember, 1999). Having gained a taste for vigilante blood, the Boondock Saints (as they quickly become known in the Beantown media) follow the pager and then other contacts on a self-guided reign of justice. Trying to sort out this trail is butch gay FBI detective Paul Smecker, a great Willem Defoe doing his best Sherlock Holmes. Inevitably, this film pretends to ask whether or not vigilante justice is ultimately justified if the big criminals are operating above the law, but really it’s just interested in upping the body count, keeping the dialogue funny and fast, and employing production tricks.

Potentially interesting is the utter lack of concern for realism that permeates the film. The twins (played with infectious energy by Sean Patrick Flanery—Indy in the Young Indiana Jones series— and Norman Reedus) live on top of a building, out in the open, basically, in Boston. The why and how of this is never explained. Similarly, the Catholic overtones, highlighted in the title, are hard to make sense of. The film starts with the brothers in mass, but the scene seems to function stylistically more than anything else. That said, they are guided by a prayer (similar in feel to Joules quotation of Ezekiel in Pulp Fiction) taught them by their father, but it isn’t actually Catholic or even Christian. They seem to borrow the language and imagery from the Chruch, but the moral code they live by is decidedly their own. Still, analyzing it even at this surface level is probably beside the point.

With the frantic pace, jerky and overdone production, and non-linear chronology, the film reminded me more of Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet than anything else. Ultimately a fun, pseudo-pretentious mess. B-