This review includes spoilers. For other DustyReviews movie reviews, click HERE.
Subscriber: [commenting on the review] This was a bomb dropping on Beaver Cleaverville. For a few paragraphs, this place was Armageddon!
[shouts]
Subscriber: There was a movie review!
_____________________
Rating: R
Director: Troy Duffy
Writer: Troy Duffy
Stars: Willem Dafoe, Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, David Della Rocco, Billy Connolly
Run time: 1 hours, 48 minutes
Release date: January 21, 2000
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE PLOT
via wiki:
In Boston, Irish American fraternal twin brothers Connor and Murphy MacManus attend Mass, where the priest mentions the fate of Kitty Genovese. Later, while Connor and Murphy are celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day with friends, three Russian mobsters arrive and try to shut down the pub so they can demolish it for the valuable land underneath. Despite Connor and Murphy’s attempt to talk them down, a brawl ensues, in which the Russians are defeated and humiliated. The next morning, when two of the Russians seek revenge, the brothers beat them to death in self-defense.
FBI Special Agent Paul Smecker is assigned to the case and finds that the police and the press see the MacManus twins as heroes. The duo turn themselves in at a police station, where Smecker interviews them. After the twins retell their incident to Smecker, he declines to press charges and allows them to spend the night in a holding cell to avoid attention from the media. That night, they receive a “calling” from God telling them to hunt down wicked men so that the innocent will flourish.
Connor learns that a local hotel is hosting a meeting of the Russian mob. Having equipped themselves with weaponry from an underground gun dealer, the twins kill nine Russian mobsters, while Rocco, a friend of the twins and errand boy for local mafia boss Giuseppe “Papa Joe” Yakavetta, surprises them after being sent by his boss to carry out a hit. Realizing that he was set up, Rocco agrees to help Connor and Murphy. That night, they hunt down and kill Vincenzo Lapazzi, Papa Joe’s underboss, at a peep show.
Falsely believing that Rocco is behind the murders, Papa Joe hires the legendary hitman, “Il Duce”, to deal with the problem. Rocco takes revenge on his former crew and convinces the twins to shoot up a gambling den so he can execute a criminal he was once forced to assist in a heinous crime. The three men are then ambushed by Il Duce. Although they manage to escape, the three men suffer serious wounds, including the loss of Rocco’s finger.
Hours later, as the police secure the crime scene, the investigation seems futile since the twins covered their tracks by spraying any blood left behind with ammonia. However, Smecker happens upon Rocco’s finger and analyzes it, eventually tracing the clues back to Rocco and his allies. This leaves Smecker in a difficult conundrum; he struggles with the choice of whether to prosecute the three men or join them in their cause as he believes they are doing the right thing. After getting drunk at a gay bar and subsequently taking advice from a reluctant priest, Smecker decides to help the trio.
Later, the twins and Rocco inform Smecker that they plan to assassinate Papa Joe at his mansion, but Smecker learns that they are walking into a trap. The twins are captured, and Rocco is shot and killed by Papa Joe. As Papa Joe leaves, Smecker arrives disguised as a prostitute and tries to rescue them before being knocked unconscious by Il Duce. While the twins say their family prayer over Rocco, Il Duce enters the room and prepares to open fire. However, he instead finishes the prayer – revealing he is the twins’ father and deciding to join his sons in their mission.
Three months later, Papa Joe is on trial for the third time. However, the reporters on-scene anticipate his acquittal. The twins and Il Duce, aided by Smecker, Dolly, Duffy and Greenly, infiltrate the courthouse and take the spectators hostage. Unmasked, they make a speech stating that they intend to eradicate evil wherever they find it before reciting their family prayer and publicly executing Papa Joe. The media dubs the three as “the Saints”.
The Review
Sometimes you watch a movie and don’t know how to feel about it when it ends… in a good way. That’s how I felt about this one. The Boondock Saints is a highly entertaining movie that is, essentially, an elaborate thought experiment. It asks its audience to consider what it would look like if the good guys who allow evil to flourish started taking matters into their own hands. Who gets to decide which people are evil? What should the punishment look like? What role if any should religion play in this process? Is the net result of taking action likely to be worse than doing nothing? The movie addresses all of those topics without providing any answers to its questions. The whole point of the movie is to make you think. Troy Duffy makes his intention very overt by having a fictional group of news interviewees weigh in on the Saints – with none of them agreeing. I suspect his hope was that the crowds leaving the theater would continue that debate outside after the credits were rolling.
The movie opens with a priest discussing to his congregation a real life news story to his congregation. The sets up the major question of the film.
Monsignor: And I am reminded, on this holy day, of the sad story of Kitty Genovese. As you all may remember, a long time ago, almost thirty years ago, this poor soul cried out for help time and time again, but no person answered her calls. Though many saw, no one so much as called the police. They all just watched as Kitty was being stabbed to death in broad daylight. They watched as her assailant walked away. Now, we must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men.
The original news article about the murder claimed that there were more than 30 witnesses who did nothing during the crime. The incident led to studies on a phenomenon dubbed “the bystander effect” or the “Genovese effect” though there has been considerable pushback in subsequent years to the original news article’s details and regarding the phenomenon and whether it’s real.
Duffy’s thought-experiment made film works largely due to finding the right balance between dark comedy and taking itself seriously, and due to the excellent performances of its cast. In one sense, the quick-to-fight Irish guys trope is beaten to death, so the film needed the McManus boys need to be comedic. In another sense though, the big questions posed by the screenplay need to be taken seriously enough that you leave the film debating with your friends over what you just watched. Duffy’s screenplay manages the balance by starting more on the comedy side and gradually ramping up its tension and serious emotional beats as the film progresses. When we get to a public execution scene, as the film ends, it’s not jarring because the plot has steadily worked toward the moment.
The star performer of the film is Willem Dafoe – the alpha male homosexual crime scene investigator who finds himself gradually siding with the vigilantes. The performance is superb for a lot of reasons. First, he manages to be funny throughout. Second, his character gradually and believably unravels, in such a way that he successfully makes the audience question whether siding with the Saints is a good idea at all. When we meet him, he’s in a suit and tie, cracking wise with Boston police, and easily solving complex crime scenes. He’s the best version of himself. By the end of the film – when he’s on the side of the protagonists – he’s in drag, with his wig coming off, murdering people. When he first kills a mobster, he mutters to himself, “too far,” and as the audience we cannot help but agree. Dafoe’s character arc and his performance as the character are a strong argument against vigilantism. There is a line one should not cross and once he crosses it, nothing good comes of it.
David Della Rocco’s character, also called Rocco, is another argument against vigilantism. He’s another character that begins as comic relief and unravels. Unlike Dafoe’s Det. Smecker, Rocco is a gangster when we meet him. Despite being a counter-point to Smecker, Rocco also unravels when attempting to emulate the McManus brothers, going from a career low level mobster, but an alive and well one, to going on a killing spree, picking and choosing who the Saints’ targets are. He quickly becomes overwhelmed by all of this and is eventually killed.
Who is well-suited to being a vigilante then? The three McManus boys seem to be. They are cool. They’re successful. They are good at it. They seem to be able to manage their grisly goal without falling apart. The film implies that they are divinely appointed to this task. They pray. They attend church. They seem to have divine intervention on their side with respect to continued survival. However, that divine approval is never confirmed. That lack of confirmation is a big deal. Without it, we could attribute their success to their own cleverness and their accuracy with their guns. Or we could attribute it to the devil. (They describe their “wings” as black, in a monologue near the end of the film.) Without divine consent, we can assume they are no different than the men they target, excepting that they give themselves a righteous approval for what is otherwise very overtly sinful action.
Without divine consent, we must judge their actions solely on their own. Is murdering murderers justice? The Saints don’t provide a trial. In fact, they killed someone as the movie ends who was exonerated at a trial – though it is implied the trial was a sham.
It goes without saying that this movie absolutely earns its R rating. I lost count of the number of times the f-word was used (there’s a joke in the film wherein Rocco constructs a couple of sentences almost exclusively with the word.) Most of the movie’s violence is implied, rather than shown, but there is plenty of blood to be seen. Willem Dafoe in drag, kissing a clueless mobster, is played for laughs, but it gets creepy pretty quickly, with his wig coming off, causing him to look deranged, and then the murder that follows. Probably the most alarming moment in the movie, though, is when a very twitchy Rocco accidentally shoots and kills his girlfriend’s cat. I don’t have much to say about that. It was played for extreme shock humor, but it was hard to watch. This movie is not for everyone, and it’s probably not even for most people.
In many ways, this film was a predictor of the two decades of superhero films that followed it, because it asks a lot of the same types of questions. Who appointed the Batman? Who gave Spier-Man the permission to fight criminals on his own? What does a society look like if individuals look the other way, because stopping crime is not their job? Is there a balance between vigilantism and ignoring the evil around us? I liked that the movie did not answer its own questions, because frankly there are no clear answers to its questions.
If you’re up for a very violent, very dark-comedy that evolves into a grim philosophical thinker on the reach and role of “good people” within their communities, I recommend this movie. It’s fast-paced, well-acted, entertaining, and it will spur a debate – either within yourself or with whomever you watch it.
Have you seen The Boondock Saints? If so, what did you think?
