CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of The Boondock Saints

Thursday, January 15, 2009

this entry brought to you by modest mouse, "fly trapped in a jar"

at the time i wrote this review i hadn't done any deep searches on the internet for boondock saints reviews, and had no idea this movie actually has a considerable amount of hate going for it. when this was written the only thing i'd heard about it was from people that i knew that said it was the bestest thing ever. i should also point out that this was written without the benefit of watching the documentary overnight, which is about the director, troy duffy.





Every single guy I've ever talked to always says the same thing. "My favorite movies are The Professional, Snatch, Pulp Fiction, and Boondock Saints." I'd never seen Boondock Saints, but I always said, well, I absolutely love those other three movies, so I can't wait to see Boondock Saints. I honestly didn't know anything about it when it arrived in the mail other than the fact that it was supposed to be a crime movie that was very violent.

...And I absolutely hated it. There's a chance that, had I not heard every guy I ever knew gush about it, I would merely think it was amateurish and retarded, but with so much enthusiasm for it by people who swore by other movies I loved, I honestly felt offended. The Boondock Saints would probably be extremely entertaining if I was 14 years old and had never seen an R rated movie before. Unfortunately, I am above the age of 14, and unfortunately, I saw the movies it so desperately is trying to be years before The Boondock Saints was ever released.

Firstly, let's get this out of the way-- everything about director Troy Duffy's script is desperately trying to mirror Quentin Tarantino. It's as if Duffy had completed his 100th viewing of Pulp Fiction, sat down at his computer and said, if Quentin Tarantino could use the word "fuck" 187 times, if I use it 200 times, it'll be awesome. If Quentin Tarantino had a scene where a guy has an uncomfortable conversation with gangsters that repeatedly uses the word "nigger" in True Romance, then if I do the same it'll be awesome. If Quentin Tarantino had a scene where a dude accidentally and unexpectedly gets his head shot off during a conversation that otherwise had nothing to do with killing that person, if I do that with a cat then it'll be awesome. And Pulp Fiction had a guy that would quote the Bible before he waxed a dude and that was cold blooded! If I have my main characters say a prayer before killing, it would be awesome! And dude, Pulp Fiction was told out of order, if I mess with the sequence of events in my movie, it'll be awesome! And when Luc Besson had Leon drop from the ceiling upside-down and he totally shot a bunch of dudes in The Professional, if I put that in my movie, it'll be awesome. And check it, it'll have a totally awesome hip soundtrack! It feels like the only awesome moment from the 90's that didn't somehow make it into this film is the revelation that the main characters have been dead the whole time, or that they are both part of somebody's split personality.

Keep in mind that I recognize that Quentin Tarantino liberally borrows from his favorite movies, but Tarantino knows the difference between homages to classics and downright clumsy ripping off. The Boondock Saints comes off as a 14 year old trying desperately to replicate cool without having any concept as to what cool is. Duffy obviously feels that he is in the same school as Tarantino, but his movie is beyond juvenile, it's a haphazard mish-mash of cliches and outright theft.

But wait, there's more: The acting is uniformly bad, even from Willem Dafoe who, up until now, has been an actor I never disliked, yet chews the scenery mercilessly like a first-timer believing this is his only shot at the big time. His character is gay-- get it? He's gay! The two main characters who we are supposed to think are awesome badasses have absolutely no character and might as well be smirking cardboard cutouts with brows furrowed. There is pointless misogyny-- there are four females with speaking roles, all of their screen time combined is probably about a minute total, and all of them involve crying or nagging. For that matter, one of the only female characters is a butch lesbian-- get it?-- and gets punched in the face by one of the main characters with no retribution! The Boston police are portrayed as being sub moronic, and they take constant abuse from Dafore's FBI agent, yet Dafoe never gets his comeuppance-- he's just an obnoxious character, and that's supposed to be subversive. "Il Duce", who is talked about as if he's the ultimate assassin badass, doesn't actually do anything. He shoots at the main characters and makes them yell as if this is really an awesome gunfight, but that's it. This ultimate badass can't kill three guys standing fifteen feet in front of him, nor, in fact, anyone over the course of the movie. The twist at the end where his true identity is revealed is forehead slappingly stupid and obvious. And there's the final scene in the courtroom, which, again, is supposed to be edgy and subversive (and oddly preachy considering the tone of the rest of the film), but is utterly baffling. Why did they force an innocent young woman to watch a man's head get blown off? In what way did that serve the movie, other than to be sadistic?

I tried hard to think about this film without the context of people's reaction to it, and if it were in a vacuum, a movie I'd never heard of that arrived in my mailbox from Blockbuster by accident, it would be merely bad. But the thing about movies is they need to be viewed in context of the world around it, and the context of time it was made. I've heard people defend Boondock Saints by saying "It's supposed to be a B-movie", but clearly it wasn't intended to be a B-movie-- it never self-parodies as B-movies do, there is no wink or nods or sly grins. Boondock Saints acts as if 1990-1998 never happened, and it needs to be viewed as a movie that came out in 1999, years after the movies it was obviously influenced by, but still within a time span where every independent movie with a gun in it was being exactly what this movie is so desperately trying to do. Think about Snatch for a moment, or Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels. If Pulp Fiction had never come out, Snatch would never exist, and Guy Richie does not make any pretense that he's not from the Quentin Tarantino school for making over-the-top mobster movies. This, however, is not a criticism of Richie-- Snatch is an extremely watchable film and is compelling, doing things and moving in directions that Tarantino hasn't. It's an awesome film that wears its influences on its sleeves. Even if Boondock Saints were intentionally a B-movie, which it obviously is not, it's still an unremarkable B-movie, for bringing nothing new to the table.

I find it flabbergasting that anyone who's ever seen a crime film for the past fifteen years would want anything to do with this movie, and I can't separate my viewing from the fact that people everywhere love this film. Indeed, immediately after watching the film and discussing with my wife how much we disliked it, I got on Rottentomatoes.com and looked at the critics reviews-- it got an extremely rotten 18%, which did not surprise me. Equally unsurprising was that the user reviews were almost exactly flipped-- a whopping 88%, which was exactly my personal experience with people I knew who'd seen this film. Trying to figure out exactly what people see in Boondock Saints is what drove a bad movie that I merely didn't enjoy into an absolutely loathsome one that made me angry to have seen it.
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with love from CRS @ 9:55 AM 

1 Comments:

yay! we have pretty much the exact same gripes about this. we are awesome! - kristen

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