Scooby Doo Meets the Boondock Saints

I've never made any sort of secret out of my hatred for the original Boondock Saints. I've often said it's the worst film I've ever seen, and I stand by that. There may be worse movies out there and I'm sure I've seen some, but all those are widely agreed to be horrible movies. None of them have the stark-raving, drunken, tattooed fanbase that The Boondock Saints boasts. Piranha 2 is dismissive material. It was made with no ideals and no pretensions towards being anything but a quick Italian cash-grab. Calling it the worst movie of all time is par for the course. It's not a serious criticism because it's not a serious film. The Boondock Saints is clearly a labor of love, boasting some really profound morals that cater to peoples' stupidity and base instincts. People were passionate about this film when it was made.

In retrospect, I'm not even really sure why the hell I saw this movie. I suppose for the same reason I saw New Moon. It's the sequel to what is essentially 9/11 with Nickelback playing over it (I wrote that sentence, and then it got me thinking: does such a video exist?), but everyone thinks it's just the bees knees. So much so, in fact, that it's the most advertised film I've ever seen in the way of posters, t-shirts, etc. and The Boondock Saints is probably the film I've most often seen on other peoples' DVD shelves. Even my older brother is a heathen to my cause, and many intelligent, well-spoken men of film honestly defend it as a serious film. I feel like Zorro these days, but without the moral and legal impunity that apparently comes with vigilantism. And without the sword. You guys could use more sword through your chests.

The Boondock Saints II picks up eight years after the original. The MacManus brothers went on a murder spree that gave millions of people worldwide huge murder-boners at the end of the last film and have since been hiding out in Ireland. Then a priest is killed in the same style the MacManus brothers killed people, and they're off to solve the case. Along the way they meet a wacky Mexican comic relief character/sidekick played by Clifton Collins Jr., an actor I was starting to quite like before this, and an FBI agent who is a woman and so therefore must be attractive. She also does things like see clues at a crime scene with her eyeballs and make all the other detectives jealous of her keen deductive intellect (otherwise known as eyeballs). And there's something about Il Duce, who I can't really remember from the first movie, and his past making vests. A noble profession.

So how does it hold up to my expectations? Well, since it's the exact same fucking movie, I'd say "pretty good". World-famous cocksucker Troy Duffy, writer and director of these two films and no others, has spent ten (10) years writing this movie. Ten fucking years. In the time he spent farting and writing jokes about it, I doubled in mass, graduated from high school, dumped a handful of girlfriends, had my first #9 with no tomatoes from Jimmy John's and watched over 1000 movies. Yeah, that doesn't sound like much, but it's more than creating a script out of pure fart and then filming it.

So let's dive into the dicks and docks of what makes this movie horrible, and let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. The acting is horrible across the board, but it's a little less stressful on me this time because they aren't robbing Willem Dafoe, one of my most beloved actors, of his dignity. In particular, Julie Benz is a fucking fever dream as the character with the eyeballs. She's playing exactly the same character that Willem Dafoe played in the original film, and that's a role that not even goddamn Willem "God Damn" Dafoe could manage, let alone an actor who has a hard time maintaining an accent. It's one of those roles where you wonder if, as research, the actor watched footage of air-raids. Though I'm sure she was doing her very best with a script that thinks it's funny to have her say "fuck" because she's a woman and thinks that eyeballs are all it requires to outclass local law enforcement.

Troy Duffy directs this movie like he woke up with his skull cracked and bleeding and a big sack of money attached to a time bomb was laying next to him every morning during production. He applies style simply because it looks cool, never because there's any reason to apply style. This is filmmaking 101 and one of the most important rules of filmmaking that I have yet to see a good excuse for breaking: style depends on content. Similarly, you cannot mate a cat with a dog. Actually, a more apt metaphor here would be "you cannot mate an earthworm with a toaster". So when Troy Duffy suddenly starts shooting the movie like a grindhouse film, is he doing it because he's illustrating the content of the film visually, or is he doing it because he's not exactly sure why Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino do it, but it sure looks cool in their movies? Fuck you, Troy Duffy.

So let's get down to business. I've been putting off revealing why these movies REALLY suck.

I don't flinch at violence, twisted codes of ethics are nothing new (I live in Indiana) and my blood, 2/3s of it greener than...something green and Irish. I don't have to cater to you assholes. Go to hell.

I'd like to point out first of all that Troy Duffy's sadistic philosophies are nothing new. But here's the gist of them: bad guys deserve to be executed. Okay, we already do that. What the fuck else do you want? Oh, yeah, the court system and trial by a jury of your peers thing needs to be removed. And who do we replace them with? Two psychopathic Irishmen. I don't see how this could go wrong.

Look, we all know the court system is flawed. But can you imagine how much more awful things would be if we gave a few men impunity to carry out the law in whatever way they liked? There's a philosophy that says the best form of government is a tyranny, but it's the most easily corruptible, and a corrupt government is the most dangerous and ineffective government of all. The same philosophy argues that a Democracy is the worst form of government, but the most difficult to corrupt, therefore a Democracy is the most effective form of government simply because it's a convoluted mess. The same thing applies to the court system. The system itself is bad, but already so susceptible to corruption. If something as convoluted as the United States justice system is still eminently corruptible, making it more corruptible is not the solution.

The film offers violence and sadistic fantasy (both things I'm fine with--I'm sickened by the context) in lieu of serious discussion about the issues the film tends to just shoot at.

"But Oliver," I'm sure you're asking "how can you condemn a film like this and not The Dark Knight, which you still slobber over like a twelve-year-old girl at a Jason Mraz concert?". Good question, reader I just made up. The difference between the two films are thus: The Dark Knight takes place in a make-believe world, in a make-believe city and featuring make-believe criminals. The Boondock Saints takes place in a world clearly modeled on our own (when Troy Duffy isn't muddling his intentions with retarded stylistic tricks) in a city called Boston which is real, but sometimes seems like an abstraction, and featuring criminals based with no pretense of fiction on real criminals. Not a bullet-proof argument by any stretch of the imagination, but it's something that factors in. Second, Batman isn't a murderer (again, not bullet-proof, but work with me here. This is going somewhere.). Third, and I think most importantly, Batman is portrayed as a mentally ill, flawed human being who knows what he is doing is a throat-jab to the fine men and women who work to bring down the bad guys using entirely legal means. Christopher Nolan never tried to push a one-man judiciary system on us and call it a legitimate philosophy. Troy Duffy has spent two films telling us how cool it would be if we shot mafiosos.

I can't think of another film that's violated my moral code ever. I barely even have a moral code. I could care less if they release a Columbine video game. No one is honestly trying to sell us on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's personal philosophies, and if they did no one would fucking buy it. But people talk about The Boondock Saints as if it's a paradigm of moral straightforwardness. People buy this philosophy.

If anything has become clear to me here, it's that maybe I don't hate The Boondock Saints. Maybe I hate that it represents a group of people stupid enough to love it and large enough to demand a sequel.

1/10