The Boondock Saints: On-This-Day Thursday
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Every Thursday, an older film released on this opening weekend years ago will be reviewed. They can be classics, or simply popular films that happened to be released to the world on the same date.
For January 21st, we are going to have a look at The Boondock Saints.
I’ll be quick to admit that my taste in films as a teenager was incredibly questionable. I loved gore, horror, and anything Hot Topic would be willing to sell you back in the day. I’ll get more into those terrible picks another day, but I’ll go on record and say that I wasn’t into the best stuff. I was also a metalhead, and I distinctively remember how many film samples extreme metal songs would use (particularly death metal variants). Bleeding Through were a bit “lighter” (as a metalcore act), but still, I remember the highly affecting uses of sound bites in the opening and closing songs of This Is Love, This Is Murderous. Once I found out they were both from the same film — some mysterious flick called The Boondock Saints where a random guy yells “There was a firefight!” — I had to watch the film in question (by this time, I was about thirteen, so I really wasn’t up to speed with cult films by that point).
Still, young whipper-snapper me somehow knew better. When I did get around to The Boondock Saints maybe a year or two later, I could just tell something was very off with this film, as if it were ersatz philosophy in action form. I can pinpoint what bothers me about The Boondock Saints now very easily, but as a teenager, I couldn’t quite put my thumb on it. I just wasn’t all that into it, and I was then finding Slipknot too tame musically, so I wasn’t put off by its excess (which I certainly don’t care for now). Instead, I think I could just see through its blood soaked sheen and understood it for what it was: half-baked commentary through the guise of excitement.
Even then, I think I was comparing the film to The Matrix (which came out earlier the same year of 1999, the year of our Lord [trying to fit in with the religious obsessive mumbo-jumbo of The Boondock Saints here]). Here was a real action film with philosophy 101 sprinkled all over it. I can’t claim that The Boondock Saints was trying to rip that off (more like Pulp Fiction and the like), but I couldn’t separate the two films either. Why did The Matrix work for me (let’s forget about those sequels for a minute), and The Boondock Saints didn’t? It wasn’t a personal belief thing, either.
That face when there was a firefight.
Older me has The Boondock Saints laid out with all of its separate parts that bother me. The over-the-top religious connection that doesn’t feel genuine at all (maybe because each and every moment like this is framed like a music video). The editing work that actually butchers flow and natural connectivity (that iconic “firefight” sequence, involving an impactful shootout, has fades which frankly flat out suck, and kill any momentum that moment deserved). The sound mixing is quite off, so music and gun shots clash so heavily (including over dialogue we’re meant to hear). Basically, The Boondock Saints is just slapped together in a myriad of ways, which is a shame because there are some great performances at the core of this picture (particularly from Willem Dafoe as FBI agent Smecker). The MacManus brothers (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus) are also quite good, but, like Dafoe, they are underserved by a calamity of post-production errors.
If The Boondock Saints isn’t assembled like a music video, it’s smushed into one ball by what feels like a team of high schoolers. Again, these gaffes feel so rudimentary to the point of carelessness: fighting sounds (music, dialogue, and environmental cues), hokey juxtapositions with shoddy transitions, and far too many dynamic shots just because lead me to believe that this is a film made by someone who likes motion pictures, but not by someone who truly understands how they work. Are all of these concerns a problem when it comes to feeling excited by a film? No, and an astoundingly-high 7.6 on IMDb (all things considered) proves that.
I can’t be a part of this tally that approves or finds The Boondock Saints to be a cult classic. I find it actually irritable, even though there is a clearly defined intention that could have been executed better. I don’t mean to be the guy that poops on the parade of those that love this film, because I can see why it thrills them. I just really don’t like this thing on any level; if it was cast poorly, I might have found The Boondock Saints to be one of the most frustrating films of the ‘90s. Also, no. I don’t still listen to Bleeding Through. On the topic of metalcore, Converge and I never parted ways.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.