Unnecessary: Boondock Saints II Trailer

The Boondock Saints is a horrible movie. In fact, personally, it's one of my top 5 least favorite movies of all time, up there with such luminaries as Empire Records and Love Actually. I've actually been punched for voicing such an opinion of The Boondock Saints' first go around, and after I saw Overnight, the documentary about the writer and director Troy Duffy, and realized how much of a ridiculous person he is, it only strengthened my resolve.

The first film not only had a terrible plot, poor character development, crappy action sequences, and an awful "commentary" ending, but there are so many "Boston" movies such as Gone Baby Gone and Monument Ave. that are just so much better. Granted, this is an action movie in the John-Woo-rip-off mode and thus can be held to different standards as those dramas, but I don't find anything in this movie to recommend. It's a sociopathic film that has no reflection on the characters portrayed; Willem Dafoe's tranny FBI agent is such a retardation and Billy Connolly's Il Duce doesn't seem to have much of a purpose. Forget the Irish theme supposedly drawn up by the fact that the two leads are Irish Catholic vigilantes who society is sort of led to believe that they are doing good. Sure, they are getting rid of the baddies. But the action scenes are just awful I think; they are overcomplicated, and the slow motion has no beauty to it; and the staging is abhorrent because there is actually very little grit to it. Duffy is trying to make something shallow and stylish out of something that should be more brutal and less fanciful. Maybe it would come off more interesting if he actually cared about his two lead characters, Irish brothers who think they are on some mission from God. That character motivation alone is just kinda nuts but in Duffy's hands is all the more frustrating for the caricatures he creates. There is something freaky about how they kill for God, but Duffy doesn't do anything with it. He just goes along which makes me think that he's just some religious nutjob making a movie about religious nutjobs.

So quoting the Bible is cool? Yes when Jules does it in Pulp Fiction, because at the end it becomes a key character beat for him.

Two guns and slow motion? Yes when John Woo does it.

Hanging from the ceiling by a wire? Yes when Brian De Palma does it in Mission: Impossible (even though that movie kinda sucked too).

Violence and religion? Yes when it was called Mean Streets or State of Grace. Or The Apostle if you include baseball bats.

Oh and the second one is coming out at the end of the month. Seeing Duffy's face intro the trailer on the Rotten Tomatoes version makes me want to smash my computer screen. He's so smug. The fact that Peter Fonda is in this just screams "I did it for the money." And the fact that Judd Nelson is in it, well that's just a neutral addition.