What’s so incredible about Boondock Saints is how David Della Rocco’s atrocious performance distracts from lots of other terrible things going on in the film. At least when Della Rocco is onscreen. When he’s off… well, then the omnipresent deficiencies proudly scream their presences.
Della Rocco gets all of the film’s racist jokes and I think all of the misogynistic ones, unless there’s some sexist jokes during the Willem Dafoe sequences. Dafoe’s an apparently self-loathing gay FBI agent—you can just hear writer and director Duffy telling someone it’s not homophobic because the character’s gay so it can’t be—and the performance is weird combination of horrifying and exhilarating. Dafoe plays it to the nth degree; sadly because Duffy’s a terrible writer and terrible director, none of it’s successful but the scene where Dafoe acts out an action movie scene is the closest to “good” Boondock ever gets. If only it weren’t so stupid.
Identifying when, how, and why Dafoe’s scenes are offensive is fodder for a doctoral thesis. Not even getting to the transphobia.
Boondock Saints tells the story of brothers Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus. They don’t have the most successful Irish accents but aren’t actually particularly bad… because the roles are absolute nothing parts. They discover they’re really good at killing gangsters and go Frank Castle, only with godawful banter and lousy action scenes. Dafoe’s ostensibly on their trail but he’s having a crisis of conscience because he deep down thinks they’re right.
Della Rocco is their low level gangster friend who ends up joining their crusade but without any of the moral imperative. He just wants to kill people. And hit women.
Though given the film introduces Flanery and Reedus beating up a female coworker because, hey, they’re Irish guys and why can’t she take a joke, it’s Saint Paddy’s Day. Or something.
I understand Boondock Saints is low budget, but they really didn’t think to get any actual news footage of Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in Boston? Like, the scene of it in the movie is seven or eight guys at the bar in an otherwise empty establishment.
Anyway. Most of Della Rocco’s most offensive stuff is in his solo scenes or at least solo shots, like Flanery and Reedus’s agents were like, maybe don’t be in the room with him and Ron Jeremy deciding how to be the most racist or the shot where he assaults a woman. There’s also this thing, which has less to do with Della Rocco and more to do with Duffy, about how Della Rocco’s girlfriend is a druggie… who’d do anything for a “dime bag” (of weed). Because… those pot addict women really are… something.
Like everything in Boondocks any thinking about it is overthinking.
Technically, the least incompetent feature is probably… the editing. It’s not well-edited and the action sequence editing is silly, but Bill DeRonde’s cutting isn’t noticeably bad. Duffy’s composition is lousy but Adam Kane’s photography still manages to make it worse. The lighting is bad. Jeff Danna’s music is bad. Robert de Vico’s production design and Mary E. McLeod’s costumes, they’re bad. But the cutting’s okay. It doesn’t make an impression, which is the best you can hope for with this one.
Performances… I mean, Dafoe’s doing a tour de force no doubt, but it’s not one worth seeing. Even if it weren’t problematic, it’s still not worth suffering the bad direction and script. Flanery and Reedus seem to get better as the film progress, which is more Della Rocco being in it more and being so amateurish. Billy Connolly’s cameo is… the nearest the film gets to actually funny. David Ferry and Brian Mahoney might actually give the most solid performances as a couple local detectives. Otherwise the cops are all bad.
The gangsters are all bad.
Everything’s bad. And never in interesting ways. Because interesting would be too much for Duffy and Boondock Saints.
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