The Boondock Saints: Review
Posted by: Kevin McCormick / Category: All Honky Capers, AVOID AVOID AVOID
Obnoxious to an extreme, viewing The Boondock Saints is like spending two hours in the company of a drunken Irish KKK Grand Wizard high off his first viewing of Pulp Fiction. It’s well documented that Troy Duffy is a belligerent, ungrateful bastard, and the screenplay is populated by characters who share his worldview and potty mouth. That there are no non-white characters is hardly a surprise, but Willem Dafoe’s travesty of a performance will blindside anyone expecting the depths displayed in the equally ham-handed Platoon. Billy Connolly is also wasted as a near-mute gunman, proving that while he may be one of the most brilliant comics to walk the Earth, his agent deserves to be thrown into a wood-chipper.
An analysis of the plot would only bore you to tears, so we’ll just go straight to Act 3 where our two dashing Mick psychopaths have now garnered a religious following of sorts, blowing away criminals like Bronson in Death Wish. Even gay FBI agent Dafoe is on their side, showing up in drag to provide a particularly nauseating deus-ex when he disregards protocol to shoot it out with the Mafia morons. This is not nearly as offensive as the asinine coda where Connolly teams up with the Micks to execute a defendant in a trial. The screenplay stacks the deck to make sure he’s unrepentantly guilty (natch), to a degree that makes Death Wish 3 look like restrained social commentary.
There is not a single memorable line, memorable kill, or memorable instance of direction, just a relentless flood of F-bombs, Catholic fetishism, and inept gunplay. If The Boondock Saints has an upside, I now use it as a litmus test to gauge movie taste. Guess how I feel about anyone who regards this as even remotely decent?
Tags: billy connolly, Boondock Saints, troy duffy, willem dafoe
October 7th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
[...] Nature itself is a palpable aggressor, preferring not to talk most of the time. Acorns fall on the tin roof of their forest shack, making it impossible to sleep. There are those damn talking foxes and miscarrying does wandering around the cabin. A dramatic climax occurs during a hail storm, creating a wall of atonal noise to create yet another schism between the warring sexes. Then there’s the nature of man as a sexual being, which ties into a layer of guilt that sends poor Charlotte over the brink, and puts Willem through more hell than when he played the “Real Christ” for Scorsese 20 years ago. The Herculean trials that await Mr. Dafoe make Monica Bellucci’s tunnel scene in Irreversible look like a lazy Sunday stroll. His fearless performance washes clean any trace of the septic reek of The Boondock Saints. [...]