Viking Night
The Boondock Saints
By Bruce Hall
August 17, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com

It's a retirement home shootout!
Most consumers have no problem loving a huge budget blockbuster. Movies that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience usually do just that. But some films have a narrower vision, or simply contain more complex meaning than meets the eye. They aren't always art, and they aren't always even very successful. But for a devoted and eccentric few, they're the best entertainment money can buy. Once, beginning with Erik the Viking, a group of dedicated irregulars gathered weekly in a dingy dorm room to watch these films and discuss how what pleases the few might also appeal to the many. Time has separated the others in those discussions so that I alone remain to ponder the wider significance of cult cinema. But while the room is cleaner and I no longer have to skip class to do it, I still think of my far off friends whenever I hold Viking Night.

So where do I start with The Boondock Saints? If you’ve already seen this movie it needs no introduction; you probably already either love it or you already hate it. If you love it I'll bet you’ve already told all of your friends about the film and you've already made most of them watch it with you. I’m also willing to bet that about half of them looked at you like you had plants growing out of your head and asked, “You seriously liked this garbage?” And of course if you hated The Boondock Saints, then you were probably the one wondering how anybody could like such garbage. For better or worse, this is a pretty polarizing flick, less because of the subject matter than because if its execution. It’s almost impossible to remain neutral about this movie because regardless of what you think of it, you’re never going to forget how it made you feel the first time you saw it, and the reasons will vary. For me it is because while Boondock Saints actually has an interesting point to make, you’ll have to dodge so many bullets and dig through so many bodies to get at it you may have a hard time detecting it, let alone absorbing it. So before I talk about the movie itself, I should probably say something about the state of mind you’ll have if you want to enjoy it.

Have you ever eaten an entire pizza by yourself just because you felt like it? Have you ever walked into Best Buy looking for a CD and walked out with an HDTV instead? It’s not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with pizza or even with buying yourself a 52 inch flat screen television just for the hell of it. It’s that indulging in guilty pleasures a little too often can serve to blind you to what’s really best for you. Yet how we feel about that sort of thing probably depends on what we value. When we’re young we just want what feels and tastes good; it’s only later in life when our bodies lose the ability to survive entirely on sugar and adrenaline that we want what’s good for us. Well I am at the point in my life where I feel comfortable saying that not only is The Boondock Saints not good for you, it’s really not even very good. But what’s made the film a phenomenon is the fact that despite having a list of flaws as long as the Patriot Act it largely excels solely as a quirky, sadistically violent urban crime thriller. On the other hand, Saints is more than a little derivative and having been released in 2000, it’s about a five year late entry into the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Tarantino Sweepstakes. I know it probably isn’t fair that just about any unconventionally structured, self consciously hip urban crime drama released in the late '90s languished in Quentin Tarantino’s shadow. But if I can close my eyes and replace most of the cast with Sam Jackson, Harvey Keitel and Michael Madsen – and get a better film – then it is what it is. Bottom line – The Boondock Saints is a mess, but it is a stylish mess. Channel the pizza loving, ADHD afflicted teenager inside you and you’ll probably enjoy it just fine.

Saints is the brainchild of would-be filmmaker Troy Duffy, who famously conceived the project while working as a bartender on the less than sunny side of Los Angeles in 1996. His film takes place in an Irish enclave of Boston where two brothers, Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus) MacManus spend their days toiling in a meat packing plant and their nights at a local pub tipping pints with their friends. The group is a loyal, close knit band of merry men, so it is no surprise that when the Russian mob moves into the neighborhood with a shake down, the MacManus boys and their crew aren’t exactly willing to make a deal. The resulting fracas costs two of the Russians their lives and causes the FBI to take an interest, in the form of eccentric field agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe). But before Smecker can crack the case, the two brothers, motivated by their religious faith, turn themselves in and claim they acted in self defense. After they’re eventually cleared and released, the two boys experience an awakening of sorts and decide to embark on a holy crusade to rid their neighborhood of the Russians, and any other criminals they deem to have escaped the long arm of the law. The MacManus brand of vigilante justice includes not just heavy doses of lead but copious Irish Catholic symbolism, right down to the prayers they utter as they blast their victims back to the dust from whence they came. This again draws the attention of Smecker, who at first seems curiously unable to determine that this new rash of killings is obviously the work of the same two people. But eventually Smecker puts the pieces together and though he’s duty bound to bring the brothers to justice, he finds himself seduced by their conviction, and struggles with his desire to help them wipe out the mobsters.

Believe it or not, I think that this is a great idea for a movie! But the problem with Saints is that it is so poorly structured and shamelessly derivative that the sound and fury of it overshadows anything else the film has to offer. There is a semblance of thread holding the thing together, but often the movie feels more like a loosely connected series of slow motion murders, self consciously droll dialogue and ten ton plot contrivances than an actual story. And whereas most Tarantino characters are archetypal in nature, the world of Boondock Saints goes one step further and populates itself entirely with blatant stereotypes. It isn’t offensive so much as it is just lazy character development – rather than give someone even a modest degree of depth, it’s easier to just endow them with an obnoxious verbal tic or lurid personality quirk. Smecker is not just a typically dogged Federal Agent sent in to usurp the local police authority; he’s a flamboyant drama queen who stomps around crime scenes wearing a portable CD player the size of a soup bowl, working himself into a frothy sweat singing opera tunes. The ethnic Russian, Irish and Italian characters are cardboard cutouts ripped straight from the imagination of a ninth grader and while the MacManus brothers are interesting, it’s mostly just in comparison to the people around them. Flanery and Reedus aren’t given much to work with, and to call Duffy’s directing style "leaden" would be like calling Mel Gibson "a little moody."

But there’s something about The Boondock Saints that still makes it work, somehow. It’s a well edited movie whose brisk pace hardly gives you time to debate the merits of what you’re seeing. The violence present is to be expected; it is after all a gangster flick. But much of it is so utterly over the top that you can’t help but laugh at it. One scene in particular comes to mind; a shootout involving several people standing five meters apart, firing about eight million rounds into each other in super slow motion, yet nobody is seriously injured. Not only would the A-Team be proud, but they’d have as hard a time taking it any more seriously than you and I. This is a movie that seems to understand its limitations and not only does it take great care to stay within those boundaries; it joyfully fills those boundaries well past the point of excess. I also have to admit that despite the less than stellar performances, the MacManus brothers are likeable because of their faith, their devotion to one another and the fact that what they’re doing doesn’t seem entirely bad, depending on how you look at it. While it is unquestionably wrong to murder people, what if the people being murdered are murderers? We do live in a society of laws and that is without a doubt what keeps the majority of us civilized – it is in our best interests to coexist peacefully with one another. But when someone steps outside those lines and commits an atrocity for which there is no commensurate legal remedy, what should be done, and who should do it to them?

It’s a valid and important question but it is when The Boondock Saints attempts to step back from its comic book shenanigans and seriously address this issue that it falters. The film pays endless homage to scripture, and the MacManuses proselytize ad nauseum as though the sheer volume of it might absolve them of any spiritual penance they will later incur. Eventually the two Irish firebrands begin to make John Kennedy’s inauguration seem subtle in comparison. The spirit of Kitty Genovese is lovingly invoked; a woman whose brutal 1964 slaying caused national soul searching about the role of ordinary citizens in fighting crime. And in what is perhaps the most interesting part of the movie, the end credits roll over a series of man-on-the-street interviews with Bostonians as they debate whether or not the “Boondock Saints” and their brand of vigilante vengeance are morally acceptable. The problem is that this dichotomy weakens the film – on the one hand Troy Duffy clearly wanted to make his own Pulp Fiction, and in this he largely succeeded. But on the other hand, his desire to draw attention to the horror of violent crime seems incompatible with a movie that so brazenly celebrates it. If you’d like to turn off your brain and chuckle at the spectacle of Willem Dafoe in drag, or a skinny Irish boy using a commode as a weapon of mass destruction, then this movie is right up your alley. But if you seriously want to spend some time thinking about crime and punishment, do yourself a favor and just go rent A Few Good Men.

And as the Irish say, may God bring good health to the enemy of your enemy.