Sad Hill Media

Nothing, because The Boondock Saints is not a good film. In fact, it's not even passable entertainment. The Boondock Saints is a film so blatantly amateur and immature that it deserved to languish in utter obscurity on the bottom shelves of video stores, close to the dirt it bears such close resemblance to. Written and directed by former bartender Troy Duffy, this is clearly the work of someone who dreamed of the blue-collar-turned-cinema-hero story of Tarantino, but without Tarantino's knowledge of cinema and craftsmanship. It's a farce on nearly every level.

The Boondock Saints is about low class fraternal twins in Boston who, after killing two Russian mobsters in self-defense, receive a vision from God instructing them to act as vigilantes and cleanse the city of its criminals. The plot from this point on is paper-thin and serves merely as the backings for the action set pieces. (I don't worry about spoiling the "twist" when I say that someone is revealed to be the father of the protagonists, because it is not preceded by anything that would make it emotionally or logically workable at all. It's simply a cheap left-field twist worked into the third act, and it fakes humanity as poorly as the actors and filmmaking do.)

Those scenes are choreographed like a kid with his action figures, and while that sounds all fun and good, that and the excessive slow motion make the action boring. In fact, the film shows its technical ineptitude across the board. The cinematography is merely functional and often ugly. The editing is incomprehensible in action scenes and ruins any workable pacing it builds up with the godawful fades it uses as transitions.

The acting is uniformly laughable. Supporting characters rarely earn their place, merely serving as comic relief. The brothers are too arrogant to inspire sympathy, and neither they nor any other characters are smart enough to provide any deeper justification to the murders than "These are bad men and the legal system does not always catch them", nor insightful arguments into the ethics or pitfalls of vigilanteism, presumably because Troy Duffy is not intelligent enough to see through the surface of his own ideas.

Even the one proven talent in the cast, Willem Dafoe, cannot escape the narrow confines of Detective Smecker, a conflicted, homosexual lawman. His sarcasm and wisecracks, like the brothers', stand in for characterization or personal motivation. This, combined with the maybe-unintentionally homophobic presentations of his sexuality, ultimately means that it is he, torn between due process of the law and the simpler answer of vigilanteism, who should have been the thematic and emotional fulcrum of the film, whose dialogue and attempted command of his scenes crashes hardest of all. Along with casual homophobia, there is casual racism, meaning Boondock Saints isn't just bad, it's in bad taste.

Why, then, has the film gained the cult following it has? There are several reasons, all of them ironic and deeply flawed. First, cult followings of any film often see its lack of mass popularity or praise as an inherent plus, and gives them the sense of helping the underdog. Second, the movie's comedy (most of which falls flat) is edgy enough to make them laugh, because making jokes unintelligent has the benefit of making them very easy to write and laugh at. Third, the mob mentality that cult followings often have is enjoyable. Fourth, because they are lured in by flashy gunfights, dumb, cliché characters, humour that tells them when to laugh with shock instead of smarts, and a message that is far less intelligent than it pretends to be and convinces them they have somehow been enriched for watching it. In short, the lure of a simple, pandering Hollywood blockbuster. Coming from a cult movie, that's the most ironic part of all.