What's so great about The Boondock Saints (1999)? (spoilers)

The movie has a huge fanbase and all my friends love it. So I finally decided to check it out, and I don't really get all the hype.

The movie is very good at humor, it made me laugh a lot. But I felt that the serious storyline, just didn't work for me, and was too over the top to be taken seriously. The best example being the ending.


SPOILERS


In the end the saints walk into a public courtroom, announce to everyone who they are and what they represent, and then execute the man on trial. Then leave. Then the movie ends with some serous social commentary over the credits.

But this ending cannot be taken seriously at all, cause the saints just showed their faces in a public courtroom committing murder in front of dozens of witness, and on camera!

So they are now on America's most wanted, and are now fugitives, making them very powerless on being effective vigilante's. How are we suppose to believe these two are so effective, when they just dug their own graves?

I also feel that the movie overstates how bad crime really is, in America. Sure there is a lot of it, but a lot of criminals in gangs have been successfully prosecuted and the system seems to work overall fairly well, when it comes to prosecuting murderers. Sure we are outraged when they are found not guilty, but there are more guilty verdicts than acquittals, so I don't see how the audience can agree with the philosophy that the court system is incompetent, like the movie keeps trying to hammer us over the head with.

Maybe if the movie was set in Colombia or something, but they chose to set it in U.S. and so the extreme philosophy just doesn't work so well.

But even if it did, I still feel the story goes too over the top, and the cops are just too unbelievably incompetent, for the movie to be necessarily good.

But what do you think?

I love The Boondock Saints, but never felt it was anything to be taken seriously at all. It's not a film I watch in order to gain some deep message. I watch it for its over the top violence and humor. It's just fun.

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Great fun movie.

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if not for this thread i would completely forgot about this movie and i agree it's only to watch for fun,

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You can call it the art of fighting without fighting.

Why? It's a ******** of fun. Kind of quotable too.


I have hmm...3 t-shirts and a poster to remind myself how much I loved it. Does it deserve all the love I give it? Maaaaybe?

I think you sort of answered your own question: it's fun. You mention not thinking the "serious" stuff worked, but it seems to me there was very little of that. To whatever degree it doesn't work for you is, I suspect, based in thinking the film is trying to be serious when it's not.

First, they're not portrayed as particularly effective. Their first big triumph, where they rotate around the room suspended from rope, is a total accident. They're accidental vigilantes, not super-sharp assassins. There's a Forrest Gump quality to the way they bumble into their successes. Also, the fact that they're not particularly talented reinforces the film's point, which is that it doesn't require a herculean effort to push back on society's blights: sometimes it just takes people caring enough to try at all. The centerpiece of the film is the (maybe-kinda apocryphal) tale of Kitty Genevieve, which isn't a story about oppressive crime, but about mundane crime that goes unpunished because nobody takes it upon themselves to stand up to it.

Second, even if they were meant to be seen as effective...why would the ending change this? At most, it would just mean they'd have a harder time operating moving forward, but it wouldn't undercut anything that happened before they "outed" themselves.

Third, if I remember correctly, the triumph at the end of the film isn't the court room shootout, but the stories of other people following in their footsteps. That ties into the story I mentioned earlier. Their success is not killing this particular group of bad guys, but serving as an example so other people will stand up to them, which means their efficacy has very little to do with how visible they suddenly are to law enforcement.

It's a fictionalized universe, not a documentary. It's not necessarily meant to reflect the actual state of crime in America. And there were indeed times, as recently as just a few decades ago, where crime has run rampant in urban areas. It may seem like a distant memory now, but New York City in the 70s and 80s was very, very dangerous, which is why you got vigilante movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish in the first place.

sure it does .. i have 2 The Exorcist t-shirts

OMG I HAVE ONE!!!! But it's not a regular shirt...I'm a big supporter of Last Exit to Nowhere, so of course I picked up their Exorcist shirt. Only once has someone run up to me, pointing at my chest screaming WHERE DID YOU GET THAT. (It's a shirt with Beringer clinic logo)

I havent seen it. Looks like I have to now.

OH MY GOD ASGHDJASGDHJAGSDHJAGS I am so jealous that you get to have a first time experience with this.

I dont know why it never came to my attention before now. Looks fun.

well there was a little bit of a buzz about it when it came out, but it's not like its name gets thrown around that often, except in the sort of, half-cult scene. I say sort of, half-cult because it's not quite a cult classic but it kind of appeals in the same way.

Billy Connolly;s in it! Woooo. And Norman Reedus without flippin zombies. I;m in.

One name can define this movie: "Willem Dafoe"

Speaking of Reedus pre zombies (was a fan of his waaaay before TWD), have you seen the one with him and Alan Rickman?



Don't google it, by now things get spoiled real fast on a search!

Bloody hell my watch list today alone is exploding. OK wont google but it;s on the list. Thanks, cat.

From a production standpoint, The Boondock Saints (1999) will probably be the last time a major studio will just give a guy off the street with a script funding and the opportunity to direct a film. Originally, Miramax offered Duffy a budget of 15 million dollars and salary of $450,000 to write and direct The Boondock Saints. After multiple problems, Miramax pulled out, and a more independent movie studio picked up the project, but for only less than half of the original budget. After it premiered at Cannes, nobody wanted to distribute the film because of the recent Columbine School shooting, and that's how it spread through word of mouth on home video.

There was a documentary made called Overnight (2003), which documents the rise and fall of Duffy's relationship with Miramax and Harvey Weinstein. The film paints Duffy as a colossal dick during production, suggesting that greatly contributed to Miramax pulling out of the film.

Okay thanks. I understand that it's trying to be fun and it is fun in quite a few moments but I feel it's a contradictory movie, cause they try to stick in serious themes, like the ending, where people are being interviewed on how they feel about the vigilante justice, and it just comes off as serious and doesn't go with the fun tone. It feels like it goes through tonal shifts, instead of just picking one, at least to me.

Fair enough! Sorry you didn't enjoy it as much.

It's weird for me to be defending it, anyway, because I don't exactly love it. I think it's good, and fun, but most of my friends think it's fantastic. I think part of it, as @Gangland alluded to, is that it's just such a surprising little movie. Even people who don't know about the circumstances under which it was made seem to regard it as kind of hidden, relative to its quality, which I imagine makes it more delightful when it turns out to be pretty good.

It used to be one of my favourite movies back when I was about 14 or so, but I daresay I've long since outgrown it and would be hard-pressed to actually call it "great". As noted, it was done by a first-time writer-director so it's obviously rather rough around the edges in almost every regard. I do reckon the others are right about the appeal being because it's a fairly breezy Tarantinoesque tale full of violence and one-liners that happens to have a simple and agreeable moral centre regarding its approach to organised crime, plus it went through the typical cult film process of being underseen upon release and then building up a following.

As for the ending, I think it's about intimidating the evil as well as inspiring the good - by publicly killing off the biggest mob boss in the city, they're showing that they have both the will and the ability to take down any crooks who think that they can shirk the legal system so it serves as a warning that they'll come after anyone else who would do that.

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