The Boondock Saints (1999): or, I Am More Intelligent than Professional Critics

You may attribute this to the fact that I have literally zero formal education with film. You may attribute this to the fact that I have been a fan of this movie for damn-near a decade. Hell, you may even attribute this to the fact that I am a clown bastard, who wrote this in a fit of drunken passion, and now has to edit it as a sober man. But, upon my most recent viewing of The Boondock Saints, I decided to mosey on over to Rotten Tomatoes, because, as a conscious mammal, I’m aware it isn’t the greatest film of all time, but I think it has a gross kind of charm to it, so I wanted to check it’s rating. The audience rating, of course, was 91%, because it’s a fun film; the critic rating, on the other hand, was a fuckin’ 22%, a rating which killed me instantly. Fortunately, spite brought me back from beyond the grave. Why, why, would such a fun, fan favorite, popular movie have such a scum-suckin’ rating?

I don’t want my entire reviewing life to be me bitching about how professional reviewers are wrong, and I, an intellectual, am right. I just believe that, as a General Audience Ignoramus, I am less constrained by the expectations of my peers, and more inclined to find the hay straw in the needle-stack which is a flawed movie. But, for god’s sake, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has a fuckin’ 26% critic score.

I’ll start for those of you who may not recall the plot, or may not know it. Why you’re reading a review of it without having seen it, I dunno, but follow your dreams, I guess. The Boondock Saints follows two Irish brothers (Conner and Murphy MacManus) living in the Boston ghetto who decide, believing it is the will of God, to become vigilante killers of all of the corrupt individuals (mostly mobsters) they can gain access to. An FBI agent by the name of Paul Smecker has to fight between his desire to bring these two to justice and his desire to let them wipe out the filth of the mob. A simple enough premise, executed with a lot of fun, as well as a pretty good representation of brotherly quarrels, wild kills, and with a gay FBI agent as the moral compass of the film.

I wanna start my extensive complaining with the Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus that started it all, which refers to The Boondock Saints as “a juvenile, ugly movie that represents the worst tendencies of directors channeling Tarantino.” I can, and will, start with the part of this statement which rankles me the most: “channeling Tarantino.” Because, y’know, Quentin Tarantino invented the genre of black-comedy crime movies. Obviously, the popularity of his mob movies triggered many wanna-bes looking for an easy profit. Regardless, there’s a distinction between a director trying to leech off of the success of a film and a director just making a movie in a similar vein.

Maybe I’m a bit of a hard ass, but this recurring theme in the Rotten Tomatoes reviews of this movie being “Tarantino-esque” seems a little more of an “I-wanna-suck-off-Quentin-Tarantino” point of view than one based on reason. Like, yeah, obviously dude’s made some bangers. I can admit that I, being a millennial-aged-film-lover, have had a Quentin Tarantino phase, and Reservoir Dogs (the movie The Boondock Saints is supposedly ripping off) is my favorite of his movies. But, I stopped being an edgy teenager, and stopped worshipping the ground he walks on, which is apparently too much to ask for out of some professional critics.

Which brings me to ask: what, pray tell, implies the attempt to “channel” Tarantino? The fact that it centers around crime? Some folks seem to have forgotten that Reservoir Dogs is not the first movie to have criminals as protagonists! What else? Vulgarity? The lack of glorious lighting? Its non-strictly-chronological organization? The gritty nature of it? A repeated prayer that’s muttered before an execution?

If we’re gonna get real honest, in my personal opinion, Quentin Tarantino is ripping of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, a 1957 play in which two hit-men wait in a basement for their target to arrive. It’s a gritty, angry, a black-comedy crime story, and it’s got boatloads of meandering conversation with no purpose, that thing which Tarantino is so well-known for. The truth is, Tarantino just continues to get more credit than he deserves, though he certainly does have a lot of credit which is his due. He did a mob movie better than Troy Duffy did, and that’s really all that should be said on the topic.

The reviews tear apart this movie in more ways than just comparing it to Reservoir Dogs, though －although, they never even compare it, they just say it is like Reservoir Dogs without any examples. (Of course, I’m going to continue bringing it back to Quentin Tarantino, but that’s just because I’m petty.) One is the movie’s lack of cleverness, as well as it’s praising of vigilante justice, and one reviewer even had the nerve to talk about it being sexist and homophobic. A film being compared with a Tarantino movie, movies which come with their own racism trigger warning.

For starters, when has it been necessary that a movie be clever? Obviously it’s a plus, because art that makes you think is always more enchanting, but being dim doesn’t stop something from being enjoyable. If anything, it just makes it easier to be received by the masses, which is certainly part of the reason this movie has such a high rating with general audiences to begin with.

Of course this movie isn’t clever! It’s about two meat-packers deciding, with no experience, to become professional killers! It exists to be enjoyed! It’s catharsis for the impotent common man against the corrupt powers at be! The plot hinges on the brothers having repeated instances of phenomenally good luck! Ron Jeremy is in it, for fuck’s sake!

The only source of “intelligence” in this movie is Agent Smecker, and even he is wildly overacted (but in such a fun way) and has occasional bouts of explosive, neanderthal-like anger. Regardless, it’s Smecker himself who points out that the shit these brothers are doing isn’t clever: “Television is the explanation for this. You see this in bad television!” Perhaps the movie tries, a little unsuccessfully, to level out its buffoonery with moments of sobriety; the shot turns black-and-white, and choir music starts when the more serious scenes take place. The goofiness counteracted with the intensity doesn’t make this movie awful, it just shows an imbalance of tone, which, yeah, could’ve been handled better, but it doesn’t make it worse than The Room.

The whole “glorifying vigilante justice” thing is almost insulting. Batman glorifies vigilante justice. Taxi Driver encourages vigilante justice. Mr. Orange murdering Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs is vigilante justice, for fuck’s sake. These reviewers are holding double standards to movies, just because one is directed by God’s gift to hipsters and one isn’t. Rocko, my least favorite character, the MacManus’ best friend, even says about their killing of those they find corrupt “Don’t you think that’s a little weird? A little psycho?” The whole closing sequence of the movie is different people either condemning the Saints or idolizing them, showing how their acts of vigilantism in and of themselves are hypocritical. Because, obviously, it needed to be spelled out for some people (like these critics) that what these guys are doing is wrong, even if it’s done for the right reasons.

Then, like a gift from the heavens, I see the critique that labels this movie as homophobic and sexist. Now, as someone who can be classified as “one of the gays,” I’m thinking that I have a vague idea of homophobia. The sexism to which they refer has to do with the fact that most, if not all, of the females in this movie are either strippers or drug addicts, aside from the infamous Giant Feminist Lesbian in the introduction sequence. Now, this clearly isn’t the best portrayal of women to exist in a movie. Annoying Feminist and Dirty Whores are some truly exhausting stereotypes, but, to say the literal least, at least Troy Duffy included women in this narrative! Reservoir Dogs has a whopping zero women with lines! And, honestly, as one of the “feminists,” I’m not too worried about the way women are displayed in a movie that is, as we’ve covered, unintelligent. Unremarkable minor roles for women tend to be less problematic than a major role for a woman which is written horribly or unrealistically.

The homophobic angle is almost exclusively coming from the infamous “What a fag,” line, said by our gay character, Agent Smecker. He gets a call while he’s laying in bed with his lover, who annoys him by continuously trying to cuddle, thus triggering Agent Smecker to call him a fag. While this ain’t the best way you could write a gay man (it serves more as a justified cheap laugh for the straight men watching), I forgive it on account of my love for Agent Smecker. He’s intelligent, sarcastic, and truly the “good guy” of the movie, which is one of the better gay characters I’ve seen in not-strictly-gay cinema, especially in the 90’s. A multi-faceted gay man in a movie that isn’t defined by his gayness? Who’d’ve thunk it.

(The entire time I’ve been writing this section, I’ve been tryna think of a gay character in a Quentin Tarantino movie, and literally the only ones coming to my mind are the rapists from Pulp Fiction, so, if that don’t tell ya something about the homophobia of his films, then I don’t know what to tell you.)

And I’m not even saying The Boondock Saints is a great movie! The fake Irish accents nearly sent me into a coma, the concept of multilingual street rats with Mary Sue assassination capabilities is offensive (though, on second thoughts, I guess it’s kinda implied that these dudes may have received training from their father), not to mention that Ron Jeremy having a role alone would be enough to put the movie from an A to a B. What I’m saying is that the movie got the slightest bit gang-banged by critics. Unless they did it in a fit of rage at seeing how much general audiences liked it, I can’t really find the reason that this movie got such an unrelenting curb-stomp.

I’m not saying The Boondock Saints is awful, either! It’s got a great pair of believable siblings, an engaging story-line, interesting characters, gnarly action sequences, the prayer is fucking sick, and it has just enough mean humor to keep me warm and fuzzy inside. I refuse to retract my adoration of this film! I’m mature (or immature) enough to admit that a movie being bad doesn’t make it any less good!

I feel like, if this movie weren’t unjustly accused of being a poor attempt at Reservoir Dogs, it would have a far fairer score. The whole rip-off thing is what it keeps coming back around to for me! Situations like this lead me to wonder what can and can’t be considered a rip-off. Like. Humans have been creating art, and stories, literally the entirety of recorded history. Everything is derivative. Goodfellas rips off The Godfather. The Golden Compass rips off The Chronicles of Narnia. Mean Girls rips off Clueless. None of these are true, but they might as well be for the standards these critics hold them to. Just shut up and enjoy your movie.