The Worst Cult Movie Ever Made Gets A Sequel

Although you'd hardly know it by reading this blog, I'm a reasonably tolerant person when it comes to other people's questionable preferences in entertainment. If I'm talking to somebody who's a fan of, say, Crash or latter-day Family Guy, I'll be disappointed and maybe roll my eyes a bit, but I generally understand that people like those things, even if I don't.

There's one movie, however, that I nearly have to physically restrain myself from biting off my tongue when I hear someone say how much they love it. And it's a problem, because I've heard it praised or spoken of respectfully quite often, including by people who I admire and whose taste I respect. That movie is The Boondock Saints, which I'm writing about today because a trailer for the sequel just came out online in the last day or so.

Before I get to that, let's deal with the original movie. The Boondock Saints essentially went straight-to-DVD in 1999. Troy Duffy, the writer and director of the film, claims that if it didn't get a wide theatrical release because of post-Columbine blacklisting of violent movies; I find it more plausible that the studio realized that they'd lose a ton of money marketing it and decided to dump it off onto home video. It should also be noted that Troy Duffy is, by all accounts, a tremendous asshole, so much so that there's a feature-length documentary film entitled Overnight about how much of a dick he is. Despite these factors, The Boondock Saints, which should have been consigned to the dustbin of history, became a genuine word-of-mouth cult hit on DVD.

Stylistically speaking, The Boondock Saints is an artless blend of the stylized character banter and narrative trickery of Quentin Tarantino, the Catholic imagery of Martin Scorcese, and the intellectual and attentional deficits of fetal alcohol syndrome. The plot follows the exploits of a pair of Irish fraternal twins who decide that they have a religious duty to exact vigilante justice upon the miscellaneous ethnic stereotypes that populate Boston's criminal underworld. They're pursued by a gay FBI agent played by Willem Dafoe, whose investigations of the aftermath of their shooting sprees are edited in parallel action with the sprees themselves in the film's only interesting touch.

The Boondock Saints is relentlessly profane, violent, and sprinkles in needless expressions of bigotry throughout (one of the first scenes with the brothers involves them getting into a fistfight with a butch lesbian who takes offense to some vaguely non-P.C. comment one of them makes, there's an extended exchange that revolves around a character telling a racist joke to one of the mob-boss villains, and two female characters are described as 'consummate junky sluts' in the shooting script). None of these are things that I typically object to in a movie, but The Boondock Saints is different, and the reason why has everything to do with the moral context that the film sets forth.

Essentially, the protagonists of The Boondock Saints are antiheroes. With regard to the plot of the movie, their primary characteristics are their disdain for the ability of law enforcement to uphold social norms and their satisfaction at dispensing violent justice to those they feel deserve it. Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with that; the antihero is a storied trope in American cinema, especially in the action/crime genre that The Boondock Saints slots itself into. Any narrative that centers around an antihero, however, has to deal with the moral relationship between the antihero(es) and the context in which they operate. There are several ways in which this is typically done. The most common is to set up a sort of moral relativism where the main character's violent or sadistic actions are judged entirely against the norms of a particular subculture rather than society at large (for instance, how The Godfather normalized murder and criminal activity by focusing almost entirely on characters within the Mafia culture) or judged as being flawed or wrong, but less wrong than the actions of the antagonist (any of the myriad films where a violent character is tasked with defeating an even more violent character). The other alternative is to embrace straight-up nihilism and make a movie that's essentially a cartoon (for instance, recent movies like Shoot 'Em Up and Smokin' Aces, the latter of which I particularly enjoyed).

The Boondock Saints ignores all of this entirely. Fans of the movie might be inclined to argue that the actions of the twins fall into the second example of moral relativism I describe above, but that sort of setup requires some acknowledgment that the protagonists possess perceptible character flaws or that their actions are in some way morally questionable. In this case, there is literally no intended irony in the use of the word 'saints' in the title; the brothers are portrayed as jovial, unfailingly loyal, religiously devout, fluent in at least five languages, and tactically brilliant. They have the Latin words for "truth" and "justice" tattooed on their hands. It's practically a show of restraint that the film's script doesn't credit them with the invention of the cotton gin. Nor is there any questioning of the appropriateness of their actions from without; on every single occasion a character learns of the brother's crusade of religious murder, they are instantly converted to their cause with a minimum of deliberation (most ludicrously in a scene where Willem Dafoe's FBI agent and a Catholic priest come to a mutual approval of retributive murder). And after all this, the movie has the sheer balls to conclude over the credits with staged TV news 'man on the street' interviews debating whether or not the 'saints' are good for society, as if this question were in any meaningful way part of the narrative. I have a feeling that Troy Duffy is the type of person who, after seeing Taxi Driver for the first time, walked away thinking about how much of a total badass Travis Bickle was.

It's instructive to compare The Boondock Saints with The Way of the Gun, a similar pseudo-Tarantino crime riff that was also released around the new millennium. The Way of the Gun, which I wish had even half the vocal cult following of The Boondock Saints, is every bit as violent and profane as Duffy's film, if not more so. It begins with a gloriously over-the-top sequence in which Ryan Philippe threatens to "fuckstart" Sarah Silverman's head, and later contains the musing "Don't you think it's funny that if I grab a woman's ass and she punches me, she's fighting for her rights, but if a faggot grabs my ass and I punch his lights out, I'm a homophobe?" And yet, partly because the antihero protagonists of The Way of the Gun are obviously low-level transient fuckups chasing a ridiculous pipe dream of a criminal scheme, that film comes off as the enjoyably cheeky genre provocation that it was intended to be. By contrast, The Boondock Saints' steadfast insistence that its leads are paragons of religious virtue plays like Reservoir Dogs as told by Mel Gibson 15 beers into the evening, and marks it as one of the most explicitly fascist American films in recent memory.

So here's the trailer for the second one:



I'll be brief: obviously, the bar isn't set too high for this movie, considering how many people love the first one despite the fact that it's terrible. It looks like this one is a revenge story, where the brother declare holy war on a mob boss that killed their priest, and possibly also stole their Lucky Charms. The trademark ham-handed religious imagery is still here, but it's kind of shunted aside in favor of more shots of the brothers holding guns and pointing them at the camera, which seems to be roughly 90% of the content in the trailer. Willem Dafoe obviously isn't having any trouble making his mortgage payment, so he's been replaced by his "protege," aka some woman, who appears to have all of the same mannerisms that Willem Dafoe did in the first. Based off of the tone of the original, I wouldn't be surprised to learn if this character is actually Willem Dafoe's character from the first movie after a sex change (after all, gay people and transsexuals are totally the same thing, right?). The twin's father, Seamus McImprobable, appears to have a much expanded role. There's roughly ten soundtrack changes over the course of two minutes. Judging by the inclusion of "Everyone loves you guys!" as a line of dialogue, I'm guessing that there isn't going to be much of a change from the moral non-ambiguity of the first movie.

Boondock Saints fans are clearly going to eat this shit up with a spoon, which I find vaguely depressing.