The Boondock Saints [1999]
Director: Troy Duffy
Actor: Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, Willem Dafoe, David Della Rocco, Billy Connolly
This is a fantastic, but unpolished gem of a film about two Irish brothers, Murphy and Connor, living in Boston, attending church as much as they can, and working out of a meatpacking plant, drinking at the local pub, yet being fluently multi-lingual (English, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, German.) One particular St. Paddy’s day, they’re having a drink at their local pub, with all of their friends, when the local Vory thug decides to throw his weight around. What ensues is a bar-fight in which the twins and their friends kick the asses of the Vory and his men. The men find the boys in their condemned apartment building the following morning and decides to teach them a lesson. This sets off a long chain of events in which the two, together with their low-life mafia friend Rocco, decide to kill all the scum that’s running the streets in true vigilante style. Meanwhile, Smecker (Dafoe), an FBI agent who is in town to investigate the murders of all these mobsters, has a crisis of conscience about whether or not he should persecute these men, or join them.
The opening scenes are fantastic, especially the one during the sermon at church. Truly awesome. Yet, even with that scene, the directing and cinematography is a bit sloppy. And not in that Resevoir Dogs sort of way, where it just adds that much more to the depth of the film, no, it’s truly sloppy. The film remains fantastic, yet flawed, and perhaps it was always meant to be that way. Perhaps it could never be better than it is now.
Simple, straight-forward, with a few thin patches in the otherwise solid storyline. Very funny. Lots of gratuitous violence and sexy slow-motion shots, which eventually got the film from getting an actual cinematic release in the U.S. because at the time of its release, Columbine had just happened, and President Clinton was doing the Hollywood rounds trying to appeal to the good senses of filmmakers regarding violence in the media. It opened in five theatres for only one week, which is why this movie is probably the first example of large-scale viral communication by way of the Internet and Word of Mouth.