The Boondock Saints: A Legacy as Thin as a Dorm Room Poster

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Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints begins in a church, where an angry pastor delivers a sermon recounting the tragic rape and murder of Kitty Genovese. This murder became significant specifically because of a New York Times article that reported “34 witnesses of the incident who did nothing but watch.” This led to an erroneous general belief in what came to be known as the “bystander effect,” a staple of pop psychology for decades to come. Much like “Stockholm Syndrome,” this is merely an inconclusive theory that was widely accepted as colloquial fact by a majority of society. The reasons for belief are numerous, but I’d put my money on the innate desire of humans to find some kind of reason for suffering. In Duffy’s spiritually righteous crime drama, released in the U.S. 25 years ago this week, the inaction of the supposed witnesses forms the cause célèbre of the McManus Brothers (Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus). They decide to become the opposite of a mere bystander–they choose vigilantism.

In the 2000s, The Boondock Saints was a movie defined critically as a lazy pastiche of much better movies. Brent Simon of Entertainment Today called the film “a ridiculous, self-important amalgamation of rehashed macho posturing.” Amongst my peers in middle school and high school back in the early 2000s, however, this description would be considered a major compliment. The film quickly became a cult classic among a particular kind of American guy, often an adolescent but adult men fit the mold as well, who consciously or subconsciously wished, in a world of post-9/11 paranoia slowly coming into focus, to have his hand at control. Duffy was allegedly inspired to make the movie after witnessing a drug dealer take a couple of dollars off of a corpse in his apartment building, and it makes sense his ego and abusive low-inhibition nature would lead him to turn it into a reactionary manifesto film.

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Yet the film ends up being rather toothless, despite the provocative premise. Its plot is cardboard flimsy, taking us from one massacre to another through two inter-spliced viewpoints–that of the McManus Brothers committing the murders and that of gay genius FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe), who walks a group of dimwitted police officers through not just the process of the killings, but the apparent motivations. The structure is unnecessarily convoluted, constantly interrupting the movie just as it gets going on a scene, never giving either the action sequences nor Dafoe’s charismatic soliloquys room to breath and making the entire ordeal rudderless and more of a slog than anything this featherweight and impulsive should ever be.

The film’s purported political stance–vigilantism in the absence of a total police state–doesn’t have any juice to it. If Duffy’s idea is to create a fully reactionary picture of what real justice looks like, he does so in an exceedingly cowardly manner. His characters lament about drug dealers and homeless guys and robbers, but the only people they actually kill are rich, organized crime mobsters. Duffy likewise has no problem with his characters engaging in generous use of the n-word, but the only Black characters in the entire film are at the end sequence with the fake news reel of people expressing their opinions that the protagonists “were in the right.”

The production was predictably tumultuous, and Duffy’s arrogant and overbearing demeanor–as a result of copious alcohol consumption as well as his obsessive need for control over every part of the movie deal–would go on to be captured in the documentary Overnight, shot alongside the film. Duffy would boast “I get drunk at night, wake up hung over, go into those meetings in my overalls, and they’re all wearing suits.” This kind of self-sabotaging bravado made less sense when you consider the film is not much more than the recreation of better scenes from other movies. The most obvious is the Dutch angle shot of the McManus Brothers pointing their guns downward, which is a shot from early in Pulp Fiction when Vince and Jules kill Brett. Another sequence where Della Rocco’s gun erroneously fires and kills a house cat with its blood and guts exploding everywhere appears to be a recreation of the sequence where Vince’s gun goes off in the car when talking to Marvin. Duffy even has Dafoe recreate his famous knee-prayer stance from Platoon after excitedly solving a crime scene. One of the shootouts likewise replicates Tom Cruise’s descent from the ceiling in Mission: Impossible, except with a lot of noise and no sense of suspense or composition.

The Boondock Saints portrays its protagonists not as suave, near-mythic professionals like Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction, or even sheepish loners like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, but as just “cool guys” who make up a loophole through their faith that allows them to kill whoever they want on behalf of moral ambiguities. This kind of movie is crack to the average American teenager who fantasizes about exerting power but doesn’t want to look like the bad guy doing it, so he drags a fraudulent sense of moralizing into the fantasy. This half-baked approach to a thriller has ultimately made The Boondock Saints‘ legacy more tied to hollow iconography than to any sort of substantive cinematic influence. For all the “cult” status the film accumulated over adolescents in the early century, its lasting imprint is rendered in arguments on now-scrubbed film forum websites and the official release posters plastered on bedroom and dorm room walls that became signifiers of a generation of teenage boys. A portrait of two Irishmen in black clad holding big guns right above your bed was as badass as it could get once upon a time. But the depth of the average poster describes rightly the longevity this film had as any sort of cinematic marker in Hollywood. To quote Roger Ebert, “You know you’re in trouble when your movie scores 16 percent on the Tomatometer, and the documentary about it scores 79 percent.”

But in its way, the notoriety of The Boondock Saints being more long-lasting than anything about the movie’s contents seems apt for a 21st-century American culture that’s all about bluster and no substance.

Soham Gadre is an entertainment and culture writer based in Washington D.C. He has written for Polygon, MUBI Notebook, The Film Stage, and Film Inquiry among other publications. He has a Twitter account where he talks about movies, basketball, and food.