The Boondock Saints (1999)
written and directed by Troy Duffy
starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Norman Reedus, Willem Dafoe, Billy Connolly

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

You probably heard about The Boondock Saints from a person. I know you didn't learn about it through a TV spot, because there weren't any. You didn't see the trailer or poster at your local theater because the movie barely got a release, ultimately playing on five screens. It didn't get awards and received almost no contemporary reviews. It wasn't riding off anybody's love of the writer-director's previous work because would-be auteur Troy Duffy hadn't made anything before and may as well have not made anything since. There is no reason for you to have heard about The Boondock Saints, but I'll bet you have heard of it and I'll bet another human being, whether in person or via the internet, told you about it, and that doesn't simply happen to any movie. Or maybe it does. Because twenty years after it was recommended to me, I watched The Boondock Saints and there is nothing there.

I initially heard about this movie from a pretentious guy in high school who spent a lot of time on the Something Awful forums and told me that you could see sound when you smoked weed. We talked a lot in math during my freshman year and I liked him. I remember two big movie recommendations that came up repeatedly: Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, which I still love, and The Boondock Saints, which I never saw.

It's funny, to look back at the people you thought were cool, the ones who only hung out with older dudes and did drugs and watched Faces of Death, and realize they were listening to the worst music and watching the worst movies. They weren't playing Fugazi CDs while smoking in their cars, they were blasting Mindless Self-Indulgence. You get a little bit older and put together that somebody was lying to you about the effects of weed so that you'd think they were a badass. And there is nothing more embarrassing.

As movies that appeal to teen edgelords go, The Boondock Saints is an excellent specimen. It's a Tarantino movie with less plot and more swearing. Its characters have a nonsense code that makes murder valiant and they get into bar fights and they have hand tattoos. But there are a lot of movies about angry, foul-mouthed vigilantes. Let's dig in.

The film begins with twins praying in a church and shocking the clergy by kissing a statue of Jesus and a priest explains the long debunked story of Kitty Genovese. They're the Boondock Saints, though they're never referred to as such in the movie (hello, Reservoir Dogs!) and the word is "Boondocks" and they're in Boston. Troy Duffy made a movie with a three-word-long title and he didn't know what one of those words meant.

The twins wear sunglasses indoors and smoke cigarettes and have hand and neck tattoos. They live in a dilapidated building and sleep on bare mattresses on the floor. The fourth thing either of them says is "Hey fuck ass, give me a beer." After crossing the Russian mob, the twins kill a couple of goons, one by dropping a toilet from a great height. The murders are seen as self-defense and they're allowed to walk free, which sets them on their vigilante path. If the police won't do something about bad murderers, it'll be up to good murderers to stop them. When the good kind of murder is outlawed, only outlaws will do the good kind of murder.

As they cleanse Boston of its bad murder problem, Willem Dafoe's Paul Smecker (a joke name that means "small pecker" haha oh boy this is great) is on their trail. He's an expert detective who has the ability to "This is my design" it up at crime scenes, figuring out exactly what happened by listening to opera and touching evidence. Dafoe's character is gay, but he pushes a hookup away when the other guy tries to cuddle, snapping a couple slurs off. He's gay, but it's cool, late 90s nu-metal bros, you can still like him because he's as homophobic as you are.

There's so much repetition in this movie that you could zone out every ten minutes and still follow everything fine. Detective Smecker will walk into a crime scene and describe what he thinks happened and then the film will show what actually happened. It's like reading a summary of a play and immediately watching the play. There's no tension because we already know how everything ended, and the movie doesn't play with that format in any significant way because Dafoe is mostly correct, making the perception scene and the reality scene copies.

And this doesn't only happen with Dafoe's scenes. The saints' sidekick Rocco will burst into a room yelling for five minutes that he killed a bunch of guys in a deli for laughing at him and after that you'll sit through a five minute scene where he kills a bunch of guys in a deli for laughing at him. Every character likes to tell stories and every one of those stories is fully illustrated for you within a few moments of its conclusion.

The movie gets slightly more interesting when the mob brings in "Il Duce" and the jovial comedian Billy Connelly gets to play a wild killer locked away like Hannibal Lecter. He doesn’t do much, getting one big scene and then disappearing until the truncated finale, but he's a personality in a film without any.

In that finale, the Saints, Il Duce and Detective Smecker separately descend on mafia HQ, as all characters in Tarantino rip-offs must do. Almost nothing happens, there's a twist that doesn't change anything and the movie ends. The movie ends with a Natural Born Killers lift where the news interviews random people on the street, many of whom have begun to idolize “the saints” and it's dumb and then it's over. But for half a scene, Dafoe dresses in drag and kills a bunch of guys. From beginning to end, he's the only interesting part of the movie and it's only semi-unique thing, even if he's basically Gary Oldman's Leon: The Professional character with better morals. Dafoe is a much better actor than Oldman, so you have to let Duffy's plagiarism slide and be grateful somebody let Dafoe go this far over the top.

But he's really it. It's Dafoe and then nothing else. You wonder how a movie this generic got a cult. There’s no difference between The Boondock Saints and a thousand other straight-to-VHS action films that were released in the 90s. In some ways it, like any other story that invokes Kitty Genovese's name, is a power fantasy. The action is shoddily staged and the script is repetition on repetition, but maybe people think the saints are cool.

More likely, I think, is the idea that people think they could be Troy Duffy. He's an amazing character and the documentary about his rise and fall, Overnight, is infinitely more fascinating than anything Duffy's made. In the early 90s, Duffy moved from Boston to Los Angeles to pursue his rockstar dreams. He didn't have much interest in film but wrote The Boondock Saints during breaks at his bartending job after watching a drug dealer steal money off a corpse in his apartment building.

When I mentioned in the Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead column that Miramax copied itself, this is exactly what I was talking about. Duffy's screenplay got around and Harvey Weinstein zeroed in on the man as his new Quentin Tarantino. Duffy, high on a deal with Weinstein, spends Overnight bragging about how in awe everybody is of him. He walks around, hungover in overalls, calling Ethan Hawke a "talentless fool" and saying he'd never do a movie with Keanu Reeves. He says every actor in Hollywood wants to "lick each of [his] testicles individually" to get a part in his big movie. he brings his friends, a group he calls "The Syndicate," with him and then lectures them incessantly about how the business works. He's a garbage human being.

The Miramax deal famously fell through and Duffy made The Boondock Saints for a fraction of the budget. It bombed on release and eventually became a home media hit. Duffy didn't receive any money from video and DVD sales until filing a lawsuit years later. After regaining control of the film, he filmed his second movie, a Boondock Saints sequel. Fake Tarantino movies don't usually get sequels, in part because these movies often end in the kind of carnage that leaves half the characters dead. You'd go back to that well, though, if it was the only one that ever gave you any water. The Boondock Saints is a minor franchise because Troy Duffy never had a second idea.

Plenty of directors in the 90s wanted to be Quentin Tarantino because of his success, but it's hard to repeat that. Tarantino is legitimately talented. Everybody thinks they can write like him until it's actually time to sit down and do some writing. But Troy Duffy? You can be Troy Duffy. His movie isn't smart, it isn't complicated, it isn't technically accomplished. You can't trip backwards into becoming Quentin Tarantino but you can accidentally become Troy Duffy if you manage to be in the right place at the right time. He's an outsider who, despite his best efforts, remained an outsider. You can watch Pulp Fiction all day long and you can think about ways plenty of its scenes could be better, but you'll never have an idea as good as that framing device. The Boondock Saints is attainable, though. We all want to be loved and have our ideas be praised and you get there by making a great piece of crime cinema or you can get lucky with a turd that a few speculators think could be hot. It's hard to be good, but any asshole can get lucky.

• The Year is 1999: The action scenes are soundtracked by the kind of keyboard preset techno music that was huge in Europe and made small headways into American radio with groups like Eiffel 65 and Crazy Frog.

• Tarantino defectors: None, though Clifton Collins, Jr. makes Boondock Saints II a movie with Tarantino defectors. Kind of surprising that Tarantino and Willem Dafoe haven't worked together, but here they are in a nice picture from the premiere of I Am Love. Willem seems like such a cool guy:

• Weirdest member of the ensemble: Gerard Parkes, who plays a bartender with Tourette's, was Doc, the only recurring human character on Fraggle Rock. He also appeared as Doc in A Muppet Family Christmas and had a regular role in Shining Time Station, making him a fixture of preschool-level kids TV. Ron Jeremy, unfortunately, makes his second appearance in this column.

• Weirdest pop culture reference: There's a long bit about a mask making a character look like Mushmouth from Fat Albert.

• Most Tarantino moment: There's a big Star Trek reference in the dialogue, and nobody likes pointing to mid-century TV shows than Tarantino. The heavy use of Catholicism also has characters saying things like "Never shall innocent blood be shed, yet the blood of the wicked shall flow like a river, the three shall spread their blackened wings and be the vengeful striking hammer of God," which is inches away from the Samuel L. Jackson speech in Pulp Fiction. A cat is killed in almost the same way Phil LaMarr's PF character was. I could go on, but let's say those three are tied for first place.

• Needledrop setpiece: There really aren't any with notable pop songs. Duffy wanted work by The Doors and Led Zeppelin but couldn't afford their steep fees, so the big music moments are set to opera and songs from his own band, The Brood. The Brood were later renamed The Boondock Saints and sold less albums than whatever band is headlining the smallest venue in your town tonight.

• Innovations in the subgenre: If it's Dafoe's character, and I think that's the only aspect of this movie you could point to as an innovation in the fake Tarantino subgenre, then the innovation is "Also rip off Leon: The Professional."

• Most ridiculous line of dialogue: "This was a fucking bomb dropping on Beaver Cleaverville. For a few seconds, this place was armageddon. THERE WAS A FIREFIIIGHT!"

• Does it work? No.

• Where did the writer/director go? After some bad deals and some lawsuits to correct those bad deals, Duffy made a sequel, The BoondockSaints II: All Saints Day, ten years later. A third movie was supposedly in the works but nothing significant's been announced there for years. In 2020, eleven years after his last credit, Duffy co-wrote a Pauly Shore comedy called Guest House.

• Left behind: Troy Duffy.