09/16/09 - The Boondock Saints

The Boondock Saints (1999, 110 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144117/

This movie has grown to gigantic proportions after its release which I see was only one weekend here in the States. It's everything you'd think of as a cult movie and for me that means hit or miss. It also meant that I didn't have the highest of expectations when going in to this viewing.

The Boondock Saints follows the two brothers Connor McManus (Sean Patrick Flannery) and Murphy McManus (Norman Reedus) who get involved with the Russian mob in Boston. Helping them out is friend "Rocco" (David Della Rocco). Their crime spree doesn't go without notice by the police as FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) is brought in to try and track them down. The film ends in a hilariously unconventional ending.

First and foremost, this film is cheesy and it's supposed to be cheesy. Therefore, we frequently get lines said in the absolute worst way possible for this sake. Almost all of the time it works because the film manages to find a pretty good blend of quality and cheesiness and perhaps this is why it's reached such cult status. The brothers never seem out of their element on screen and are pretty convincing in their super-religious ways. Rocco does a great job in a smaller role as well. However, the star is without question Dafoe. He takes this character and pushes the "hamming it up" factor way past 11 here. It's hilarious. Everyone else just looks at him like he's completely crazy throughout the whole movie, but he shows enough intelligence in piecing clues together to not be labeled as a total crackpot. His character is one of the most unique I've seen in recent memory and Dafoe plays him perfectly.

The film has some bad qualities though. For the most part, I never felt that any characters were really explored except Rocco and Smecker. Sure, the brothers are the titular Boondock Saints but they seem much more flat than these two characters. Rocco and Smecker have negative qualities and they actually mess up or fail at some point. The brothers don't and this takes away from them being as memorable in my opinion.

One thing that this film did great was the main action scenes. Though it was different every time (but handled well each time), the best example of this is the shootout with Il Duce. Here, right before the big shooting starts we actually get a flash forward to the police arriving on the scene. As Smecker walks through the clues he narrates everything that's going on while we see it going on with him participating in the scene. Dafoe is so flawless here in his over-the-top shooting that I find it hard to find any faults at all with how this action is handled. This jumping around in the timeframe is a fun way to tell these events.

Overall, I gave this film a 6/10. There's quite a few good points but I don't feel like The Boondock Saints is a great movie. Dafoe is amazing, no doubt, but I just wasn't enthralled by this film like I was secretly hoping. I don't know what it was exactly about this film that didn't engross me, but there was something. Oh well. At least I can participate in discussions of it now.

[Note: Due to a voting update, I have changed the rating of The Boondock Saints to a 5/10.]