Boondocks Saints

Boondocks Saints (1999) is a crass, glossy vigilante movie.  Two Irish lads, the McMannis brothers from south Boston, murder about 25 people, most of their victims either Russian or Italian mobsters -- although among the body-count is the hapless Ron Jeremy gunned-down, I suppose, because he was once famous as hard-core pornography's "everyman" in the kinder, gentler, more sex-friendly seventies.  The movie is crisply edited, mostly scenes of cartoonish violence with interpolated narrative that doesn't make much sense.  The vigilante brothers live like monks in an abandoned building and work in a slaughterhouse until they get angry at the supervisor, a heavyset, loudmouthed woman, who they punch into unconsciousness before embarking on yet another of their bloody crusades.  The lads have super-human powers in terms of their virtuosity with various types of firearms and other weapons and, for some reason, speak about 12 different languages each -- they seem to be able to say "fuck" in Mandarin Chinese, Russian, German and French, etc.  With a comically inept and impetuous Italian sidekick, the boys slaughter bad guys all over Boston, pursued by a brilliant, homosexual chief of police played by Willem Defoe.  (It's a tragedy to see Defoe in garbage of this kind; the actor must have been seriously short of money).  Defoe's character is the kind of esthete who tours bloody mass murder scenes while listening to Puccini arias on his ear-buds.  He's the only thing in the movie worth watching, something that the director seems to have understood, since Defoe occupies more and more scenes as the film progresses, the loutish brothers reduced, it seems, to bit players -- in one scene, Defoe waves his delicate hands to symphonically direct the brothers' mass execution of bad guys, appearing on the edge of the scene as the boy's rampage through the army of malign extras that they are murdering; he seems to be interpreting the carnage for the hearing impaired, gesturing flamboyantly this way and that as the bad guys slump to the ground riddled with bullets.  (The concept is that Defoe's character is imagining how the brothers massacred the bad guys, although the device really just seems a way to keep Defoe on screen as much as possible.)  The film is plotless, piling one bloodbath onto another, until the brothers invade a courtroom where a bad guy is on trial and, after shooting another half-dozen people apparently acting as body-guards for the villain, then, dispatch him in their trade-mark manner -- each lad holding the muzzle of his gun to the victim's head so that their bullets crisscross in his brain and emerge from eye sockets opposite to the position of the guns poised against the victim's occiput.  (In the final execution, the Italian sidekick gets to shoot a bullet through the bad guy's skull as well -- maybe his shot is supposed to exit through the villain's mouth.)  The film is competently made but morally hideous -- it's the kind of picture in which Defoe berates his Puerto Rican boyfriend for cuddling with him with the taunt:  "What are you, some kind of fag?"   There is a tendency for demagogues to set up specious pro- and con- debate to suggest that there are two sides to an issue, when, in fact, any reasonable person would deny that there is real controversy on the point:  bloody vigilantism is wrong, illegal, stupid and immoral -- there's no rational counterpoint to this argument.  Indeed, it would be idiotic to attempt to construct a moral argument in favor of lynching.  (It's important to observe that the victims of the vigilante brother's predation are all White criminals, indeed, mostly Russians who are the whitest of all White men -- the film would take on a completely different emotional and moral tenor if the two Irish brothers would gunning down Black gangsters.)  The film ends with a wholly offensive segment showing talking heads, people arguing on both sides of the vigilante issue with half of the speakers denouncing the American justice system and proclaiming themselves supporters of the two killers.  Of course, there's really nothing to debate -- vigilantism is always wrong, but the film's quasi-documentary ending labors mightily to create the impression that there are two side of the issue to argue, that the American justice system is completely broken, and that killers and rapists and other unsavory sorts (like poor Ron Jeremy) are walking our streets scot-free and committing crimes with impunity.  Of course, no one can possibly believe this to be true.  The reason the United States has the largest population of prisoners per capita in the whole world -- indeed, more people locked up than the Soviets put into their Gulags -- is (partly) because of nasty, ignorant propaganda like Boondocks Saints.  And the most disturbing thing about this movie, as I understand the situation, is that this meretricious, vicious film is a kind of cult favorite with young people. 

(Boondocks Saints has a curious history worth mentioning.  The movie is based on a script by a Boston bartender, Troy Duffy.  The movie had the misfortune to be scheduled for premiere on the weekend after the Columbine massacre in Colorado and so the film was shunted into a direct-to-DVD.  As a DVD, the film came to enjoy a cult status. Although critics reviled the picture, it enjoys a 91% positive rating among viewers, a shocking example of a disconnect between the public for films of this kind and professional critics.  A sequel to the film was made in 2009 and has proven to be less popular among viewers.  A third sequel is reputed to be presently in production.)