"And we shall flow a river forth to thee, and teeming with souls shall it ever be"
Last night we went to see Boondock Saints: All Saints Day, and it was awesome.
Boondock Saints is one of my husband’s (and my) favorite movies. For a little history, the movie originally came out in 1999 and had extremely limited release (the original story that I heard was that it came out in 2001 near Sept 11 and was never released because it's a violent movie, but imdb told me otherwise). Either way, this meant that people had to discover it on their own. A lot of people have seen it now, maybe you could say it has a cult following, but when I first saw it in 2003, I don’t think many people had seen it. There were rumors about a sequel, but the writer/director Troy Duffy basically had a falling out with Hollywood which meant that he was going to have a lot of trouble getting the second movie made (Overnight is a documentary about how Troy Duffy's massive ego ruined his potential, etc.) It was “In Pre-Production” on imdb for years, and we’d basically given up on its ever being made, but then I saw a preview online last year and started getting excited. Then a few months ago, my husband and I had this conversation:
Him: How far is it to Pittsburgh?
Me: Um, I think it’s like a 5-hour drive?
Him: That’s the nearest place that showing Boondock Saints 2. Is that too far to go?
Me: (Actually considers it) Yes.
So when I saw that they were showing it at the Troc (a concert venue that shows movies on Monday nights), we got REALLY excited :-D So given that build up, you can see that we had pretty effing high expectations for this movie!!!
So, did it live up to them? (Cast spoilers but no plot spoilers under the cut.)
In my mind, it did. I thought the movie was really good, actually. There were a ton of great lines and overall a good combination of humor and ass-kicking just like the first movie. This movie was basically a reward to loyal fans of the first movie - my husband thought it was a little repetitive of the first movie or that it was rehashing things from the movie, but I found all the references and parallels to the previous movie as kind of little “inside jokes” - like, if you really know the first movie, you’ll find this funny and you’ll get this joke/reference. So I really appreciated that, plus it was hilarious.
Sean Patrick Flannery’s chubbed out a little bit so for a few minutes I wasn’t sure it was actually him. Besides that, everyone in the movie looks approximately 8 years older, as you would expect. (Except Billy Connolly, who looks exactly the same). The new “bad guy” is played by Judd Nelson aka Bender from Breakfast Club. Greenly is priceless.
The big question that everyone wants to know is - SMECKER (AKA Willem Dafoe)! Well, sadly, he’s not the FBI Agent in this movie, there is a new chick who I was rather skeptical about but it ends up working. And there are TONS of references to Smecker and his “style” of detecting, which makes it almost feel like he’s there. If you love Smecker and think that you wouldn’t want to watch a sequel that didn’t have him, please, believe me when I say - YOU SHOULD STILL WATCH THIS MOVIE!
And then there is a new character and also - OBLIGATORY STAR TREK CONNECTION!!! (This is what’s great about being obsessed with an ensemble film….) It’s everyone’s second-favorite Romulan, CLIFTON COLLINS JR, AKA Ayel. He plays kind of a sidekick to the boys and his character really grew on me over the course of the movie and ends up being a good addition.
So in conclusion, definitely check this movie out if you liked Boondock Saints. (And if you haven't seen Boondock Saints - GO WATCH IT!) It’s available on Netflix so I’m pretty sure we’ll be watching it again within the week. Needless to say, I will probably be a bit more sober during the second viewing, so we’ll see if my opinions hold.
There are so many good quotes/lines in the movie that I had to really narrow it down to figure out which ones I wanted to use in this post. So in conclusion I will just say:
“Ding dong, motherfucker, DING DONG!”
Boondock Saints is one of my husband’s (and my) favorite movies. For a little history, the movie originally came out in 1999 and had extremely limited release (the original story that I heard was that it came out in 2001 near Sept 11 and was never released because it's a violent movie, but imdb told me otherwise). Either way, this meant that people had to discover it on their own. A lot of people have seen it now, maybe you could say it has a cult following, but when I first saw it in 2003, I don’t think many people had seen it. There were rumors about a sequel, but the writer/director Troy Duffy basically had a falling out with Hollywood which meant that he was going to have a lot of trouble getting the second movie made (Overnight is a documentary about how Troy Duffy's massive ego ruined his potential, etc.) It was “In Pre-Production” on imdb for years, and we’d basically given up on its ever being made, but then I saw a preview online last year and started getting excited. Then a few months ago, my husband and I had this conversation:
Him: How far is it to Pittsburgh?
Me: Um, I think it’s like a 5-hour drive?
Him: That’s the nearest place that showing Boondock Saints 2. Is that too far to go?
Me: (Actually considers it) Yes.
So when I saw that they were showing it at the Troc (a concert venue that shows movies on Monday nights), we got REALLY excited :-D So given that build up, you can see that we had pretty effing high expectations for this movie!!!
So, did it live up to them? (Cast spoilers but no plot spoilers under the cut.)
In my mind, it did. I thought the movie was really good, actually. There were a ton of great lines and overall a good combination of humor and ass-kicking just like the first movie. This movie was basically a reward to loyal fans of the first movie - my husband thought it was a little repetitive of the first movie or that it was rehashing things from the movie, but I found all the references and parallels to the previous movie as kind of little “inside jokes” - like, if you really know the first movie, you’ll find this funny and you’ll get this joke/reference. So I really appreciated that, plus it was hilarious.
Sean Patrick Flannery’s chubbed out a little bit so for a few minutes I wasn’t sure it was actually him. Besides that, everyone in the movie looks approximately 8 years older, as you would expect. (Except Billy Connolly, who looks exactly the same). The new “bad guy” is played by Judd Nelson aka Bender from Breakfast Club. Greenly is priceless.
The big question that everyone wants to know is - SMECKER (AKA Willem Dafoe)! Well, sadly, he’s not the FBI Agent in this movie, there is a new chick who I was rather skeptical about but it ends up working. And there are TONS of references to Smecker and his “style” of detecting, which makes it almost feel like he’s there. If you love Smecker and think that you wouldn’t want to watch a sequel that didn’t have him, please, believe me when I say - YOU SHOULD STILL WATCH THIS MOVIE!
And then there is a new character and also - OBLIGATORY STAR TREK CONNECTION!!! (This is what’s great about being obsessed with an ensemble film….) It’s everyone’s second-favorite Romulan, CLIFTON COLLINS JR, AKA Ayel. He plays kind of a sidekick to the boys and his character really grew on me over the course of the movie and ends up being a good addition.
So in conclusion, definitely check this movie out if you liked Boondock Saints. (And if you haven't seen Boondock Saints - GO WATCH IT!) It’s available on Netflix so I’m pretty sure we’ll be watching it again within the week. Needless to say, I will probably be a bit more sober during the second viewing, so we’ll see if my opinions hold.
There are so many good quotes/lines in the movie that I had to really narrow it down to figure out which ones I wanted to use in this post. So in conclusion I will just say:
“Ding dong, motherfucker, DING DONG!”