Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		2.5

The Boondock Saints Blu-ray Movie Review

Short review: If you already own the 2009 release, skip this double-dip.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater June 13, 2011

“I love cinema,” says Michael Scott’s nephew in the season seven premiere of The Office. “My favorite movies are Citizen Kane and The Boondock Saints.” The colossal joke of putting Orson Welles’ classic and Troy Duffy’s sub-Tarentino vigilante justice film on the same level illustrates the paradox of The Boondock Saints; it’s simply not a very good movie, but yet it’s esteemed by a cult following that includes aspiring filmmakers who have a misguided admiration for Duffy’s “rags to riches” Hollywood career trajectory. If you can call it a career, that is. Duffy, a bouncer/bartender-turned-screenwriter/director has made only one other film, the poorly received sequel, Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. Much more interesting than The Boondocks Saints itself is the documentary that charted its creation, Overnight, a 2003 film that was supposed to be about Duffy’s meteoric rise in the industry, but ended up showing his downfall as an abusive egomaniac who quickly became too big for his own britches. (In Duffy’s case, figurative and literal britches. He’s frequently seen in a ridiculous pair of overalls.) For reasons inexplicable, The Boondock Saints, which only played a handful of theaters for less than a week in 1999, has raked in more than $50 million on home video. It’s already been released once on Blu-ray, in 2009, and 20th Century Fox has trotted it out yet again for this 10th Anniversary “Truth & Justice” edition, which thinly justifies its existence through the addition of a single special feature—an all-new thirty-minute retrospective. And no, I have no idea how a film that came out in 1999 can have a “10th Anniversary” in 2011.

If you went to college sometime during the 2000s, you’re probably already familiar with The Boondock Saints—it’s a frat-house favorite, especially among dudes who sport four-leaf-clover tattoos—but for those of you who either escaped the movie’s home video ubiquity or were simply too beer-addled at the time to remember it now, a brief recap is in order. Set in south Boston, the film follows the MacManus brothers, Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus), a pair of devout, off-the-boat Irish Catholics who work in a meatpacking plant. After standing up to a gang of heavyweight Russian mobsters who threaten the owner of their favorite dive bar—a stuttering Tourette sufferer who goes by the nickname “F—k Ass”—the MacManuses kill the thugs spectacularly in a fight that involves a toilet thrown from a fifth-story fire escape. Idiosyncratic FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Defoe) is called in to investigate—his methods involve listening to opera at full blast—but the case is cleared up quickly when the brothers show up at the police station to tell their side of the story.

Let off on self-defense claims, newspapers dub them “The Boondock Saints,” and the duo, in a fit of spiritual inspiration, conclude that their God- given purpose in life is to “destroy that which is evil so that which is good may flourish.” More specifically, they decide to arm themselves to the teeth and take out all of Boston’s criminal kingpins, one by one, eventually recruiting the help of their buddy Rocco (David Della Rocco), a mob errand boy who’s in trouble with the local Italian Mafia boss, “Papa Joe” Yakavetta (Carlo Rota).

This is how the entire film is organized: 1.) We see the bros planning a hit. 2.) We jump forward in time to see Willem Defoe’s FBI agent—who, unbelievably, has no clue that the MacManuses are involved—pondering the bloody aftermath of the assassination, trying to figure out how/why the killers pulled it off. 3.) We then flash backwards to see how it all actually went down, which usually involves a copious amount of slow- motion, John Woo-esque gunplay. This organizational structure is repeated several times as the brothers wipe out a succession of baddies, and the novelty of the nonlinear storytelling only briefly distracts from the fact that, well, there’s really no substance to the story at all.

The film is basically an excuse to stage a series of increasingly violent action set-pieces, with little regard for the characters or any dramatic arc besides “kill the bad guys, avoid detection.” Rinse, repeat. Only the flimsiest of backgrounds is given for the MacManuses’ sudden interest in ridding the city of evildoers, and the brothers’ religious convictions—while clearly the motivating factor in their crime spree—are given little treatment beyond a hokey prayer they recite before dispatching their victims with twin bullets to the brain. That the film essentially glorifies a pair of violent religious extremists should be disturbing, but Duffy’s script isn’t intelligent enough to make “Irish-Catholic vigilantes” anything more than a half- baked conceit, as genuine as the protagonists’ frosted Lucky Charms accents. To inject some drama into the proceedings and give the film an undeserved “mythology,” Duffy introduces Il Duce (Billy Connolly), an assassin who wields six pistols and who—surprise, surprise—has an unsuspected connection to the MacManus bros. Let’s just say he has a certain similarity to Darth Vader, and not just because you can imagine him saying something like “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

The whole bloody affair plays out like a poor man’s Pulp Fiction, with Troy Duffy—or T-Duff, as he likes to be called—as the film’s cut-rate Tarentino. Duffy has a tin ear for dialogue, and he overcompensates by loading up the script with F-bombs and several gratuitous uses of racist and homophobic slurs, all in a desperate attempt to sound edgy. (Listening to the characters’ conversations is something like reading though the hackneyed, profanity-infused comments of any given YouTube video.) His editing is imitative too, vacillating between quick cuts of x-treme camera angles and long, fluid, operatic slow-mo shots. There’s even a scene where Smecker appears to be “conducting” a firefight in his mind as he mentally reconstructs the gun battle. To his credit, Willem Defoe takes the sloppy material he’s been given and performs the hell out of it, stealing every scene he’s in. Even at his most ridiculous—dressed in drag and passing—he’s a blast to watch, very nearly saving the film from itself. There’s also a convincing brotherly camaraderie between Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus—both of whom have gone on to better things in their careers—but their characters are so alike as to be practically indistinguishable. This points to a general laziness in the writing; plot holes and credulity-stretching twists abound. The film’s incomprehensible cult classic status seems to rest entirely on a few competently staged firefights and a handful of one-liners. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I just don’t get it.

The Boondock Saints Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

It appears that 20th Century Fox recycled the same 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that graced The Boondock Saints' 2009 Blu-ray release, and that's not such a bad thing. Sure, small improvements could possibly be made, but I see nothing dramatically wrong with this transfer. It won't blow you away in terms of clarity and color, but it appears faithful to its fairly low-budget source material. Grain is entirely intact—no DNR scrubbing here—and aside from what looks like minor edge enhancement from time to time, there's no noticeable digital tweaking. Any inconsistencies in sharpness can probably be attributed to source, and overall, the image exhibits plenty of high definition detail, from Willem Defoe's wrinkles and the nubby texture of the terrycloth robes the brothers wear at the hospital, to the metal intricacies of the ample weaponry on display. The film's color palette is muted and realistic, with hues that are suitably dense even if they're not particularly vibrant. Black levels vary somewhat between solid and grayish, but never detrimentally so, and skin tones only occasionally slip into overly ruddy territory. Finally, the print is good condition—you'll only spot a few white specks— and there are no noticeable compression problems.

The Boondock Saints Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is also the same, and this is definitely a good thing, as I don't see much room for enhancement. Although the sound design isn't quite as explosive as you might imagine, given the emphasis on gunplay—certain firefights impressionistically omit all noises besides the music and selected effects—there's more than enough high-octane energy in the mix to give your home theater system a good workout. When the gun battles do come alive they do so spectacularly, with punchy gunshots and bullets criss-crossing the soundfield. Even during the quieter scenes, ambience is spread into the rear channels, bringing out Boston city sounds—wind through the alleyways, distant traffic—police station clamor and barroom chatter. The soundtrack is a generic mix of American-Irish music—some of it supplied by Duffy's own band, The Brood—but it sounds good at least, with deep, defined bass, clarity throughout the range, and a strong presence in all channels. Dialogue is always clean and easy to understand. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

The Boondock Saints Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

With one addition—and one subtraction—this new "Truth & Justice" edition has the same set of supplements as the 2009 release. The film's script, which was on the old disc, is missing here, but in its place we have an all-new retrospective featuring the director and main actors. This release also contains both the theatrical and directors cuts of the film via seamless branching, but the differences between the two—amounting to about five seconds —are so slight as to be almost not worth mentioning.

• Audio Commentaries: Both commentary tracks from the original disc are back. Writer/director Troy Duffy gives a dry, depressed-sounding solo track that even ardent fans will have a hard time following, but Billy Connolly's commentary is more lively and listenable, if only because of his Scottish accent.
• The Boondock Saints - The Film and the Phenomenon (1080p, 28:56): An all new retrospective featuring Troy Duffy, Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, and David Della Rocco, who sit down for a thirty minute conversation about the film's creation, production, and eventual status as a big seller on home video. The single most interesting revelation from this talk is that fans from Japan once asked Flanery and Reedus to fill up plastic bottles with their breath and then autograph them.
• Deleted Scenes (SD, 19:09): Includes seven deleted sequences.
• Outtakes (SD, 1:32)
• Theatrical Trailer (SD, 2:05)

The Boondock Saints Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I've never understood The Boondock Saints' enduring popularity. At best, it's marginally entertaining, and at its worst it's a thoughtless, wannabe Tarentino film with no real substance. Fox knows the film is a cash-cow, and the studio is tempting fans to double dip by offering "an all-new special feature that takes you deeper into the Boondock world." This is all they've added, though, and in all other respects this disc is practically identical to the one that was released in 2009. I don't see any reason to upgrade—the new retrospective is nothing you'll miss—but if you like the film and don't yet own it, I suppose this is the edition to get.