The unpopular opinion: the Boondock Saints

THE UNPOPULAR OPINION is an ongoing column with different takes on movies that either the writer HATED, but the majority of movie fans LOVED, or that the writer LOVED, but most others HATE. We hope this column will promote constructive and geek-fueled discussion. Enjoy!

The first time I saw the cult classic action film The Boondock SaintsI was seventeen and immediately fell in love with the 93% new audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. A certified rotten 17% rating from critics? Psh, I didn’t care (not that Rotten Tomatoes is necessarily the answer to everything, but it certainly often indicates something).

Years later, I now know the truth. This is a terrible movie. It goes beyond even laughably bad and into the realm of downright bad. As I rewatched it for this column, I couldn’t help but keep saying things like, “This doesn’t make sense. This – this, this – this movie doesn’t make one feeling! What’s going on? Why – what is – why is happy – why are they doing That?” Over and over again. At least it made this truly awful movie entertaining.

“And we will be shepherds to You, my Lord, to You.

Seriously, nothing in this movie makes any sense. Here are two examples of how the logic in this film runs about as deep as a paper cut – and that is what I would relate the experience of watching this film to. Paper cut after paper cut, with some lemon juice added because writer/director Troy Duffy just felt like it.

1) Why not kill Murphy (Norman Reedus) in his apartment? There’s no need to take him to the dumpster and kill him there. This only exists so that Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery) can make his five-story jump while holding a toilet bowl, because someone decided this was a cool and necessary story element.

2) Speaking of which, after five different stories we see Connor bounce off the other Russian who isn’t Checkov and crash knee first in the ground. Five floors, he takes one look at a Russian guy and slams into the sidewalk knee firstand the only thing he gets away with is damn limping? And one that doesn’t even last very long? No. No. Absolutely not.

More importantly: The Boondock Saints is a movie based entirely on the cheap excuse of coincidence. The brothers just happened to have a mother who insisted that they speak at least six additional languages ​​(German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Latin), which also happens to be the only thing that allows the story to move forward. If they didn’t speak Russian, calling the number on Checkov’s pager wouldn’t have done anything because they wouldn’t have known to go to the hotel room, meaning they wouldn’t have met and had the boys or Rocco there murdered, etc. call the plot “development” of when Rocco sees officer Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) leaving the gay bar. This leads to Rocco following Smecker to kill him, which in turn leads to the brothers magically appearing at the right time, which in turn leads to hearing Smecker’s confession that he wants to be just like the brothers , which eventually leads to Smecker. work with them. Duffy should have just called this movie THE LUCK OF THE IRISH and been done with it.

Power has come down from Your hand,

Oh, and what about the character inconsistencies that occur throughout the film? Again, here are some of the more offensively illogical examples:

1) Il Duce’s ambush of the brothers and Rocco is extremely sloppy and thus goes against everything established about him in the film so far. He is supposedly ‘ghostly’, and yet he completely dismisses this information the first time we meet him.

2) When Smecker is woken up in bed by a phone call, after rejecting the man’s advances in bed several times, he says, “What are you doing?” “I want to cuddle,” the man answers. To which Dafoe says: ‘Cuddle? What a fagot.” This makes no sense, either in relation to what we already know about his character, or in connection with the transgression he later commits through the Freudian slip of a detective who says ‘the faggot’ instead of ‘the fat man’.

3) Why do the brothers place coins on the eyes of the dead in the hotel room? Do they actually believe in that? Why don’t they do it before or after this one event? If they believe in it, it tells us something about their characters, although again that ‘something’ is never repeated before or after. If they don’t believe in it, there’s no reason for them to do it, other than Duffy giving Smecker another chance to be “the super smart FBI agent.”

4) This guy:

Our feet can quickly execute Your commands.

Meet Rocco, a character about whom any serious discussion is possible The Boondock Saints must yield. He is without a doubt one of the worst characters in film history. F*ck you Rocco. F*ck your face, f*ck the offensive absurdity of your personality, f*ck your values, actions and choices, f*ck your childish hypocrisy, and f*ck that you have a dramatic death despite the fact that you are actually a slimy little bastard who lacks a single redeeming quality.

The thing is, Rocco’s presence is actually completely painful for a completely different reason: his existence and “friendship” with the brothers makes the least sense and casts doubt on the validity of the events and characters throughout the film. See, the brothers are on a mission to eradicate evil. They are trying to suppress the spread of rogue criminals on the streets. And yet when it comes to Rocco? Rocco, who is a willing part of that villainy, but also a misogynistic creep and a filth and slimeball who gropes dead bodies and asks if he can make things right by killing two random guys who are probably no worse than him? Not just the brothers not kill him, but they allow him to join them in their damned quest. Rocco is of no use to them other than his knowledge of the various mafia members’ habits and hideouts, which, to be fair, could be why they’re keeping him and part of their team alive.

But inside the “logic” of this film”, such practicality does not matter at all. The brothers magically know someone with a small arsenal in his basement. Why can’t they find out the details about mafia meetings/hideouts from some other source? And later, when Rocco finally dies, the brothers are very visibly and audibly distraught. That is to say, much more than he should have been if he was just an informant, meaning they still considered him their best friend despite the fact that their friendship with him goes against everything they supposedly stand for.

So we will make a river flow to You, and it will always be full of souls.

Even putting aside all of the above, this film is also seriously lacking from a cinematic perspective.

1) The script is littered with moments and lines that have nothing to do with anything other than ‘sounding cool’ – when Checkov first rolls up and says ‘this isn’t a game’, it’s not just the most stereotypical line at that moment is possible, but no one has talked about games before. Not at all. His sentence refers to something that never happened.

2) The editing is choppy and takes you out of scenes before the characters can finish their moment, meaning that scenes often lack any sort of resolution and instead artificially blend together simply because Duffy decided so.

3) The plot device of showing the before/after of an event and having Smecker figure out what happened is overused and (again) ruins the flow of the action. It’s not nearly as compelling because there’s no stakes for the characters since we already know how the event went down. It could have been fantastic once used to good effect, allowing us to witness Smecker’s deductive powers. But after that first (or maaayyybe second) time, the effect becomes dull, bland, and doesn’t benefit the story in any positive way.

4) Troy Duffy can’t even decide what kind of movie this is. The brothers have their mutual epiphany/call to action, suddenly wake up speaking the same lines of religiously related lyrics, and are suddenly vigilantes willing to kill any bad guy they come across with no moral qualms. the case? So is this an action film with religious/spiritual undertones, an almost ‘mythical’ story? It seems that way because there is no decision-making process for becoming vigilantes. But on the other hand, at other times the film feels like it’s trying to be a serious action film based in reality. And then there are the moments where it lets itself be as over-the-top as possible, with cinematic moments happening right and left (like falling through the ceiling and shooting perfectly despite being upside down and having barely killed anyone before). And it is from this confusion that much of my problem with this film stems – The Boondock Saints tries to be at least three different types of films at once, and so all its individual identities suffer, and the result is a limp cinematic noodle smothered in weak sauce.

In Nomine Patri, Et Fili, Et Spiritus Sancti.”

I could have supported a more mythical view of the already primal nature of Death wishwhich is undoubtedly one of many cinematic influences The Boondock Saints. That’s a movie that would interest me, and there are hints of it here and there. The prayer that the brothers/Il Duce say is of course great. Suitably poetic, epic and ancient-sounding for his purposes here. Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, Billy Connelly and Willem Dafoe are all great – you can tell they’re really having fun with the very bare material they have to work with. But at the end of the day, one prayer + four fun and dedicated performances + slight hints of greatness + a cool opening piece of Irish music + Willem Dafoe screaming, “THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!” not a worthwhile viewing experience.

If only Troy Duffy had been struck by his own revelation, one that subsequently told him not to make this film and thus saved me from wasting precious minutes of my life. Unfortunately. Well, at least I can always just watch…well…everything else.