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

Well I am kind of tossed up about the movie, after letting it sink in. One the one hand I really like the humor and laughed a good amount, but I found the plot to rather clunky, and oddly structured. I think the movie might have been better if it were set in a country, where criminals got away with it more, but in the 90s, the U.S. conviction rate was 85%, and grew to 93% today, or so I read. Most court cases seem to result in the crooks being convicted at least when you watch shows like 48 Hours Mystery, and 60 Minutes, or just from cases you read in the paper.

So I feel that the story wants to have vigilanties who are so desperate in seeking justice that they will kill a guy in front of a hundred witnesses, while showing their faces, but why would they be this desperate in a country with an 85% conviction rate.

It's worth remembering that the brothers only target members of organised crime (they start off against the Russian mob and then move onto killing the Italian mob), so the idea is that they are specifically going after the "untouchable" criminals who never get arrested or imprisoned in the first place (they bring this up when they explain their scheme to Rocco halfway through the movie).

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I guess but there have been several cases, of mobsters being convicted through undercover police operations, so I don't really see how they are untouchable exactly, unless I am just naive.

But I did enjoy a lot of the humor of it. I think maybe my expectations might have been too high and maybe I was suppose to enjoy it as a B movie, but people hyped it up so much. My two friends even said that it's one of the best movies ever made, so that threw me off when I watched it.

Have you seen Come and See?

I put "untouchable" in air quotes to emphasise that it's more of a generalised attitude than a tangible absolute. The "several cases of mobsters" you mention happened, true, but they are a comparatively insignificant minority compared to the entire organisations that still operate outside the law - even if they do get imprisoned (and it's implied that the Italian boss was going to walk free at the end anyway), they can still have the mob connections necessary to thrive and survive (like the prison sequence in Goodfellas where the mobsters can smuggle goods and make money despite being locked up). As far as the brothers are concerned, these guys are such irredeemable scumbags that even being stuck in jail is too good for them, so the only way to properly deal with them is to kill them.

I'm surprised people are still hyping up Boondock Saints that much in 2017. Referring to a movie as "one of the best ever made" is almost certainly going to create hard-to-match expectations even for the actual best movies ever made, but Boondock Saints really is just a mildly enjoyable B-movie that has next to no chance of living up to that hype.

I don't love it as much as I did when it first came out, but I do think it's a fun movie. I think it's got some cool and original action scenes, and Dafoe is amazing in it.