Rewatching the Stupidest Movie Ever Made
The Boondock Saints is a fabulous, demented classic.
The Boondock Saints is bonkers. It’s about two Irish guys in Boston who have a religious epiphany and start killing people, but who succeed only through a staggering amount of good luck. They are chased by an FBI agent who is even worse at his job than they are at theirs, assisted by a bumbling crew of cops who any sensible person wouldn’t trust with a paperclip dispenser, let alone a gun.
It was made in 1999 by Troy Duffy, a musician/writer/actor/director/general dogsbody for whom the movie and its sequel are his only two films. The movie didn’t just bomb at the box office. It imploded. It grossed $30,471 at the five lone theatres it opened in, which in movie terms, is less than zero.
So how did this movie - this doddering, backfiring, deeply silly movie - go on to gross over $50m in domestic video and DVD sales and become one of the touchstones of my teenage years? What the hell happened?
At a conservative estimate, I’ve watched this film fifty times. I can still quote whole segments of it. There are chunks of my teenage and university years that I don’t remember, but I can still recite the brothers’ corny prayer without even thinking about it. And yet, when I was forced to describe exactly what it was I liked about the movie so much, I found I struggled. It was just…there.
I was clearly a more tolerant teenager, or perhaps just more oblivious. Boy, The Boondock Saints is offensive. For starters, the mysogyny is breathtaking. There are almost no women in the world of the Saints, and the few that step into shot are either hookers, bound victims or mute witnesses. It’s also weirdly racist. Russians are big and nasty, Italians are smarmy and slimy, and the Irish are all good eggs. In the entire film, there is not a single Black person, Asian person, Indian person or any other person who is not resolutely Caucasian. And don’t even get me started on its attitude towards gay men, or lesbians. This movie would not get made today, and I say that's a very good thing.
The plot makes no sense at all. The brothers — who are hardly given any backstory, whose names are almost never mentioned, and who never wear anything but black T-shirts, jeans and the occasional ratty dressing gown — only get into all this because some Russian mobsters try to shut down their favourite bar. Somehow, this causes the aforementioned religious epiphany, and they decide it would be a good idea to start killing gangsters. They have an automatic and instant 100% success rate.
Somewhere along the line, Billy Connolly shows up as their long-lost dad (and why not?) He first tries to kill them, then joins forces with them after he recognises the prayer they utter when they murder someone. The cops and FBI inexplicably come on board, helping the trio murder a mob boss in the middle of a crowded courtroom.
And since we’re on the subject of Things Wrong With This Movie: Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery. They are preposterous. As the McManus brothers, they spend most of the time mumbling their lines, looking shiftily about, wondering why they aren’t in something better. This movie gives no indication that Reedus was destined for stardom, and it more or less killed Flanery’s career stone dead. Their Irish accents are unintentionally hysterical — they are both Americans — and I have a private theory that Duffy picked them simply because they had Irish names.
But see, The Boondock Saints is like a party.
Imagine that you’ve been invited to one. One you know is going to be filled with horrible people, where the beer will be piss, the punch will be poison, and the snacks will taste like dead dog. But somehow, the party works. You have the time of your life. Whoever is throwing the party (Duffy in this case) is utterly insane, but they know a few things. A few tricks to make their party pop.
You need at least two guys for crowd control. They have to be able to kickstart a dull night, get everyone talking, then feed them shots. Duffy picked the right guys for the job. It’s unthinkable for him to have picked anyone else — that’s how good they are.
First there’s Willem Dafoe. He must have been bribed or blackmailed to be here, but he gave it all he had regardless. He is the flamboyantly gay, preening, egomaniac FBI agent Paul Smecker, and watching him is like watching a ballet dancer with a machine gun.
But Dafoe isn’t the best guy in the movie. Not even close. And when fucking Willem Dafoe isn’t your best guy, you must have one hotshot talent on the books.
Who did Troy Duffy get to be the beating heart of his mad mob movie?
This man.
His name is David Della Rocco. His sole qualification was being Duffy’s mate. That’s it.
In his entire career, he has acted in a grand total of six films, two of which are Boondock Saints movies. Duffy’s level of can’t-be-arsedness is such that he didn’t even bother giving Della Rocco’s character a new name — they just used his real one. And as far as I can tell, Duffy more or less asked Della Rocco to be himself.
He is spectacular. Spec-fuckin’-tacular. Rocco is a mafia ‘package boy’, a go-between who becomes dissatisfied with his lot and decides to help the brothers take out the Italian mob. He is a scruffy, lanky, weird ghoul with crazy hair and a bizarre walk, and he is the beating heart of this film. Della Rocco knows he is making a bad movie, and so he decides to have the time of his life doing it. He is responsible for every good scene, every knockout one-liner. He wipes the floor with every single person or thing in this film.
He shows real acting chops, too — enough to make me wonder why he never did anything else with his career. Check out “Tell me a funny joke” sometime, or “Me! Me! I’m the guy! I know everyone!” or the massacre in the diner. He is responsible for the single funniest scene in history that involves the accidental murder of a beloved pet. If you can make a dead cat funny, you’ve got something.
David Della Rocco is a lot more talented than he is letting on. Without him, The Boondock Saints sucks. End of.
The music is amazing — a score that sticks with you long after the movie ends. Everything, from the simple panpipe theme to the electronica-laced rock to the mournful orchestral refrains, is tip top.
And despite his lack of experience, Troy Duffy showed some real talent. The cinematography, helped along by Adam Kane, is slick and surprising, and Duffy puts together some genuinely good work. Smecker’s account of how each murder happened and how it actually happened begins to blend together in unexpected ways, and it is a joy to watch. There are so many great individual moments, so many “Remember that part where…” like the scene where the Russian heavy is murdered with a toilet from above. I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.
It is the combination of all these things — Della Rocco, Dafoe, the music, the unconventional directing, the one-liners — that have given The Boondock Saints a life beyond its original story. I still see dudes with Veritas or Aequitas tattooed on their hands. I still see pictures of Reedus and Flanery popping up as avatars on Twitter. I can still hold a conversation using nothing but lines from the film, particularly when I break up Rocco’s “HOW THE FUCK” monologue into its constituent parts.
Sadly, it's also become one of the touchstone movies for edgelord assholes online. The kind that hang out on 4Chan and think the jackasses who marched on the capital should be hailed as martyrs and that Joe Rogan is "the best, man, just raw unvarnished truth". It's not hard to see why. I think you can draw a direct line from the behaviour of the McManus brothers to these buffoons. But it's also possible to see the movie as a product of its time; it would be very hard to argue that the people behind it had some kind of racist agenda. For my money, they were just enjoying the opportunity to make something big and loud and stupid, while being unconsciously offensive in the process.
Duffy did make a sequel, believe it or not. It was awful. It had but one decent line (“Ding dong, motherfuckers! Ding dong!”) and the Rocco replacement was instantly forgettable. Duffy keeps making noises about a third film. Please God, no.
The Boondock Saints is a stupid, offensive, loud, drunken, obscene, wonderful, hysterical, ridiculous movie. It’s the greatest cinematic party of all time, and you owe it to yourself to watch it. You’ll be telling your friends about it for years. I have.
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About the Creator
Jackson Ford
Author (he/him). I write The Frost Files. Sometimes Rob Boffard. Always unfuckwittable. Major potty mouth. A SH*TLOAD OF CRAZY POWERS out now!
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