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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."

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