The Boondock Saints (1999)
The Cast
Willem Dafoe ... Paul Smecker
Sean Patrick Flanery ... Connor MacManus
Norman Reedus ... Murphy MacManus
David Della Rocco ... David Della 'Roc/Funny Man' Rocco
Billy Connolly ... Il Duce
Gerard Parkes ... Doc
Carlo Rota ... Yakavetta
Ron Jeremy ... Vincenzo Lipazzi
Kevin Chapman ... Chappy
Generally when a big holiday or recognisable event day takes place, I do my best to review a movie that fits perfectly for the day. Some of them are ridiculously easy and predictable (Groundhog Day), some just fit into a specific genre for day (horror movies for Hallowe'en), and some require a little bit of thought. Seeing as how I lent out my copy of Good Will Hunting a few months back and still haven't gotten it back, this was the closest thing I could find to an Irish movie to review for St. Patrick's Day. If only I would've waited to review The Departed.
For those of you that aren't in the know about what TBS is all about, allow me to enlighten you. Written and directed by some guy named Troy Duffy, the film focuses on Connor (Flanery) and Murphy (Reedus) MacManus, fraternal twins that found their calling in life the day after a drunken St. Patrick's Day brawl. When the brothers wake up to discover the beat up Russian mobsters from the night before in their apartment, it looks like the brothers MacManus are done for. In a situation like that, there's a high potentiality for the common motherfucker to bitch out, and that's exactly what happens to Connor, allowing him to save his brother from a grisly demise. Believing that God Herself had chosen them to be avenging angels, the brothers decide to become vigilantes and seek out the evil that lurks on every street corner.
Turns out that a good buddy of theirs, Rocco (uh, Rocco) is a low-level flunky with a high-powered mobster named Yakavetta (Rota). Rocco is as pissed off as the brothers are at the evil committed by the sick fucks that he runs into during his day-to-day flunkying and offers to help the so-called Saints with their holy cause. Since a lot of the victims are on the FBI's Hot lists, Agent Paul Smecker (Dafoe) is sent in to determine exactly who is behind these gruesome gangland killings. Smecker is a genius at recreating crime scenes, ferretting out exactly what happened and when, but still not able to discover exactly who the professional gunmen are.
Duffy wrote this movie in 1996 after seeing a fellow tenant taken out of her apartment in a bodybag. He had grown righteously disgusted and pissed off at the world around him and decided to put to paper what he couldn't put to their throats. So yeah, 1996, indie filmmaker. You've got three guesses to figure out what similar movie that TBS has been compared to in the intervening years. If you said Pulp Fiction... umm way to go. There's a lot of fuck words, shooting guns and offbeat humourous dialogue scenes in TBS so I guess I can see how people would make that comparison.
It's an alright enough movie I suppose, though it would be fairly terrible if William Dafoe wasn't in the cast. The professionalism he exhibits in the face of such rank amateurs like Flanery and Reedus is to be commended. His obsession with discovering the culprits behind the assassinations grows in intensity, threatening to push him over the edge into madness. There's also a super bonus for those of you that remember Fraggle Rock. You'll never look at Doc the same way again. Billy Connolly was decent enough in the movie, but he was sadly barely in it enough to count. And for those of you that are watching 24 this season, Morris used to look like a pretty convincing badass in this movie.
I enjoyed The Boondock Saints well enough, though it's painfully obvious in many scenes that Duffy seemed to be in love with his own material and the cast he assembled for the movie. For some odd reason I remembered this movie being far better back in the day. Youthful exuberance I guess. If there's anyone out there that wants to lend me The Passion of the Christ to review for Easter, I'll be all over that bloodbath.
3 / 5