This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.
Movie #34: The Boondock Saints
When I first saw The Boondock Saints, probably sometime around 2008 on this very DVD, I was aggressively Not Into It. I barely even remembered any part of it, I’d blocked it out so much, except that the two main characters, Connor and Murphy MacManus (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus), up and decided to start killing people. Turns out, there’s actually more to it than that. What really happens is that the MacManus boys get into a fight with some Russian mob guys while defending their friend Rocco, are jumped by these same guys the next morning and wind up killing them in self-defense, and are struck by some sort of holy calling to become vigilante murderers of bad guys. Massive gunplay and bloodshed ensues. So while on this objective second viewing I can say that this is not necessarily a bad movie, per se, I can unequivocally say that it is simply Not My Thing.
It’s not even gunplay or bloodshed I have objections to. I have LOTS of shoot-em-up movies. It’s just, well, this movie is weird. I mean, aside from the holy calling to kill bad guys, there’s also Willem Dafoe going crazy (possibly for real as well as in his role as FBI agent Paul Smecker). Dafoe’s character chews an inordinate amount of scenery as some sort of magic detective who can solve an entire crime by dancing around the crime scene to some opera playing on his Discman (no, really). And at each subsequent crime, Smecker goes a little bit crazier, putting his bloody gloved hands in his hair, reenacting the crime he’s just magically solved as an interpretive dance, and stealing a bad guy’s shot off finger from a crime scene, before he goes completely nuts and asks a priest to confirm that it’s okay if he helps the murderous vigilantes, since they’re doing so much good. He’s also gay — a homosexual who gay bashes his lover, which is fun — so he dresses in drag and makes out with a mafia dude and maybe kills a couple guys, all to help his murderous vigilante friends. Like I said, weird, and I didn’t even touch on Billy Connolly’s character, Il Duce. (I could not make this stuff up.)
The actual most interesting part of this movie is at the very end, when a reporter who has frequently appeared in the movie to give a report on each of the dead bad guys crimes and their anonymous killers, dubbed “the Saints” (which, whatever), does several “Man on the Street” interviews to ask the public what they think of the Saints. The responses, varying from “they’re doing great work,” to “who are they to judge” to everything in between, are honestly fascinating. Whether the responses were scripted or not (and I’m assuming they were), they manage to show an authentic view of how so many people, even living in the same area, even being close friends interviewed together, can have wildly different views on law and order (the concepts, not the show — everybody loves Law & Order the show). So while the movie itself is kind of hopelessly bizarre, filled with stylized violence and a fantastical plot, it offers up a subtle commentary on society at large — for those astute enough to notice it, at least.
That’s assuming anyone watching it doesn’t immediately tune out once they’re asked to believe a bar in Boston, on St. Patrick’s Day, would have no more than a dozen guys inside. I’d sooner believe God asked a couple dudes to murder a bunch of bad guys for him.
Viable Option 