The Boondock Saints

Is this the long-awaited adaptation of the insightful and incendiary comic strip we’ve all been waiting for with baited breath? No. But it isone of those weird indies that seems to slip through the cracks and off of the radar of the hipsters that you happen upon every so often, thus making you dance gleefully and foolishly as YOU are the cool cat that found a lost gem. Sadly, I am not the person that found it, my friend Oktober is, but hey, I was like, you know second to find it so that makes me sorta cool too. Like, I’m the guy behind the guy, right.

Boondock Saints tells the tale of two nice Irish boys that live for revelry, shenanigans, and tomfoolery, and are loved for all of these things. All this changes though after a run-in with the Russian mafia leaves both brothers almost dead and wanted by the police for said Mafioso’s deaths. They turn themselves in and are all charges on them are waved off when it comes out that they had killed in self defense when the Russians had sought the boys out for an earlier fight they’d all had, but the press has gotten wind of what has happened and want to talk to the Saints as they’ve been dubbed so the brothers lay low over night in an empty cell. And it’s during that night that the boys realize what they were put on earth to do, and realize it via a shared dream – they were put on earth to punish the evil people of the world and to lay waste to them as if they were the hand of God. So as soon as they can get out of the jail they set about hunting down the criminals that stalk the streets. After their first mission though, tracking down the rest of the Russian mobsters that got it all started, they realize that they really don’t quite know who to go after so they recruit their friend, a runner for the mob, and the three begin reigning vengeance down on the criminals of their city. Opposing them is a cop that admires what they are doing but can’t allow them to continue on with it, and also a hit man hired by the mob to hunt these rogue do-gooders down before they can hunt the mobsters down. And as the movie pushes forward these three factions move inevitably toward one another until a showdown is unavoidable. Man alive do I love this movie! A brilliant and weird crime thriller, this could have and probably SHOULD have been a by the numbers yawner relegated to late night television but that succeeds on the shoulders of the brilliant cast. Willem Dafoe, as the gay cop after the brothers really steals the show. He is funny and manic and his character is so wonderful because as much as he disagrees with their methods, he envies the brothers the ease of what they do and the swiftness of their justice. And as the brothers, Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus really work well together, having an easy bond that makes you feel like they really are brothers. And hot DAMN is it cool to see comedian Billy Connolly as the assassin sent to kill the boys, making a very rare serious turn and silently devouring scenery by the yard. The movie might have been decent without them but man, without this cast it would have been a soulless film that you forgot as soon as it was over.

The disc has pretty good special features – a commentary, deleted and alternate scenes, and some outtakese, but really, it’s the movie that is the star here. It’s the kind of movie that makes you feel warm after seeing it, as if you have seen something rare and special, kinda how you felt when you saw Pulp Fiction. The kind of movie you are desperate to tell everyone you know about so you can share the yummy goodness of the film. It’s hard to review the movies you really love, something that doesn’t compute at all because you’d think you would have more to say, but oddly you have less to say. Because how do you sum up the warm and fuzzies you get when you see said movie? Or the way it makes you just stare in awe at it, wondering how someone else never made something like it before. And I am SO jazzed they are doing a sequel!

Essentially a crime thriller, as I said above, the brilliance of the film is at how wonderfully the cast plays it all, as if it’s a biblical epic and the brothers two avenging angels, and even though we’ve seen this sort of movie before, we’ve never seen it done like this. And it isn’t necessarily the parts as much as it is the way that they all come together- cast, writing, direction, and the interaction of it all, that make this film so brilliant and compelling. …cr…