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Boondock Saints

© Andrej Ristic

I entered the video store and clerk was watching an interesting film. The scene on the screen was the following: after killing several people three men were exiting the house with Vivaldi symphony in the background. There, on the other side of the street, a guy was waiting for them, his hair was gray and dirty and his beard was a bit shorter than the ZZ Top guys, he was dressed in a long black leather coat, opened it, pulled couple of guns and started shooting at them. Over the picture, as a part of it, superimposed was Willem Defoe, conducting with the background symphony music and explaining what happened. As it turns out, he was a cop, that came to the scene of the crime after the shooting, and was describing it while finding the clues.

I loved the idea, Defoe is a briliant actor and the scene was done marvelously. And then I rented the film.

There is another two minutes of the film that have the same quality, that bring pure joy while watching and that is it. It is a film that has a lot to thank for to Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Connor (Sean Patrick Flannery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus), Bostonians, Irish boys in matching coats, get into a fight with local mobsters and accidentally kill them and then decide to continue killing all the mobsters they can find, always remembering the priest in their church, telling them that for bad things to happen, good men have to just stand by and do nothing. An FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Defoe) is called to investigate and he is the sole character that truly comes to life, from his homosexuality, over his love for classical music, his Sherlock Holmsian style of deduction, to his support for the political views shared by the NRA.

Writer-director, Troy Duffy had a couple of brilliant ideas here, one of which I mentioned in the begining, but ended up sawing them up with bad dialogue, copies of other people's ideas and an extremely political ending. The ending leaves a viewer wandering how frightful that right to bare arms really is, it leaves the viewer with a fear that it was NRA that decided to finance this film. Because the murderers, even though they killed nothing but bad guys, are on a certain high from it, are feeling justified to feel the rage, anger and all the emotions that Christianity associates with evil, even though they are closely related to the church and are reciting Catholic prayers every time they kill. But then again, perhaps that should have been expected.

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