Directed by Troy Duffy, starring Sean Patrick Flanery (Connor), Norman Reedus (Murphy), Billy Connolly (Poppa MacManus), Clifton Collins Jr. (Romeo), Julie Benz (Eunice), Bob Marley (Greenly), Brian Mahoney (Duffy), David Ferry (Dolly), David Della Rocco (Rocco), Peter Fonda (The Roman), Gerard Parkes (Doc), Judd Nelson (Concezio Yakavetta) and so on.
I am a Boondock Saints fan. The first movie, that is. It’s one of those unpretentious things made with brass balls and a rock’n'roll sensibility behind it that I just can’t help liking. It’s not particularly deep or profound, but it has everything that will establish a cult following – which it did.
Troy Duffy has been surrounded by massive rumours and controversy all the way through the process of trying to get the second movie made. He attributes the making of the second movie to the fans and it’s not surprising that he wants to give the fans a big pay off with this movie. You have to bear that in mind.
Flannery, Reedus, Connolly et al. all reprise their roles, which is in and of itself an accomplishment. They are having a lot of fun and you can tell. There are a few newcomers, like Julie Benz, Clifton Collins Jr., Judd Nelson and Peter Fonda, which says something about the popularity of this world.
The storyline follows the arc of the first movie, expanding and complicating the vendetta side of the Saints, especially Poppa McManus, and that’s fine, that makes sense. The McManus brothers have put down their weapons and gone into hiding on Ireland, growing prophets beards and herding sheep, how very symbolic of them. They get drawn back to Boston when someone assassinates a priest and uses their MO to gain attention. It is a Saints mission, no question about it.
Once they arrive there they are dragged into the same kinds of situations as they were in the first movie, violence, gangsters, bloodshed and drinking hard. Their new sidekick is the Mexican guy Romeo, who qualifies by showing his ability to fight and shoot when he meets the Brothers on the boat.
The tree everyman cops Greenly, Duffy and Dolly struggle with the new FBI liaison Special Agent Eunice Bloom (Benz) who has unbeknownst to them been sent by Paul Smecker. It’s all very convoluted.
What all this boils down to is an extremely elaborate plot that basically hinges on the simple idea that the sins of the father are revisited upon the sons.
There are numerous shout outs to the fan base, like the reprisal of Rocco’s character in a dream sequences (with a cat, no less), the bar owner Doc with his Tourettes, the Irish Gun Dealer – who incidentally has one of the best one liners in the whole movie.
You will get everything you can possibly ask for as Boondock fan in this one, including off colour humour, violence en masse, revenge motifs and everything else that you could reasonably expect.
Somehow, though, despite all that, this is not the movie I was hoping for. There are some things missing and I think it is in part the fact that Duffy is so in love with his own characters that he wants to give everyone their moment. It’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t always serve a purpose. Also I miss the connection between the brothers. There is a lot of rough housing and physical humour, but personally I miss that sense that they are moving in synch like a pair of good hunting dogs, which was one of the things that made the first movie for me. It’s not that they aren’t synched up, but I would have liked to see something of the protectiveness and warmth that was evident in the first movie.
The other thing that made me tilt my head and scrunch up my face is a bit more tricky. One of the things that appealed to me in the first movie was the fact that Connor and Murphy were regular working class, blue collar guys working in a meat packing place, that happened to have a destiny and abilities and a get out of jail free card from a higher power. They succeeded in their mission mostly by blundering in and getting it done as if someone or something guided their hand. That’s still true to some measure, but it’s self-consciously done here. And again, it lacks the simplicity of the first movie.
I know I’m asking for too much. I do. I want the rock’n'roll mood of the first one coupled with the intricacy you can expect when someone has had ten years to think of a project and I’m not saying Duffy isn’t breaking an arm and a leg to give it to the viewer, but there is such an emphasis on giving us more bang for our buck that some of the small things that made the first movie so great get lost in the sheer ambition and size of this one.
Also, this is the most blatant cliff-hanger “there will be a sequel” ending you could have been given. And that lacks … poetry. I know, it seems incongruous, but there was a certain poetry to the first movie.
We all know the sequel is never as good as the first movie. And yes, there are exceptions, most notably The Godfather. But in general the sequel always lacks something. Sometimes it lacks a lot of somethings, sometimes it isn’t able to recapture the spirit of the first movie.
Boondock Saints II is over the top, shoot ‘em up and profanity abounds. It has some moments of intensely good acting and some incredibly campy and regurgitative moments that make me cringe. It is so preoccupied with having balls that it forgets about the head and the heart. And that’s too bad. I like it well enough, but it’s doesn’t hold a candle to the first one. Sadly. And I feel like I am being really harsh with Duffy here, because he wants this to be bigger and better so badly you can feel it infuse every frame. I get it. I get what it is he’s trying to do, I can see it, but for some reason it just doesn’t get all the way there.
Mule
The Aristocrats (2005) directed by Paul Provenza is actually a documentary of sorts.
There’s a joke. It’s an old Vaudevillian joke that starts with the line “A man walks into a talent agency…” The man himself then proceeds to show the act he’s offering. In the basic premise of the joke the act is a family – mom, dad a couple of kids and a dog. The punch line is “What do you call yourselves? – The Aristocrats”.
It’s a fairly simple joke – but the thing about it is all in the middle. You can tell this joke for about half an hour. The dirtier and nastier it gets, the better. The middle part, the act itself, can be as scatological and as insane as you like. Actually, the worse it gets, the better the joke. Add incest, bestiality and violence and your golden.
So in this documentary we’ve got some of the best known comedians in the business telling versions of this joke and talking about when they heard it first and how it goes and what they’ve done with it and so on and so forth. It gets really, really nasty. Namedropping is almost impossible here, but we’ve got Jason Alexander, Hank Azaria, George Carlin, Billy Connolly, Carrie Fisher, Whoopi Goldberg, Eric Idle, Eddie Izzard, Bill Maheer, Penn & Teller, Paul Resier, Robin Williams, Drew Carey, Bob Saget and so on and so forth. Did I mention the mime and the ventriloquist? No? well, there are those too.
This is a comedians’ joke. It’s a very in-house thing, like a mental exercise, a meta-joke, if you like.
Me, personally? I understand what it is all about in that slightly twisted intellectual way that is not really conducive to laughter, but that gets you something else when it comes to the nature of things.
Comedy is hard. Being funny in a way that actually manages to make people laugh is not something that should be taken lightly. This is not a funny joke because it is a funny joke, it is like jazz music, a variation on a theme that lets you see the what the artist has to bring to the table. And you have to understand something about the context of all this – the censorship in movies and television have a lot to do with why all these comedians get a little giddy in the telling of this extremely blue joke.
Some of the renditions in this documentary are pretty sickening. Like many documentaries you should probably not have dinner while watching it if you’re sensitive. It’s also the kind of thing that startles a laugh out of you, because you don’t know what else to do with it. It’s about boundaries and limits and how far you can take it, and of course that’s going to be off-putting.
I tend to view a lot of supposed comedy with that automatic distance that you get when you can put stuff together before it happens. Sitcoms spare me the trouble of laughing myself with the canned laughter they supply and most comedies just make me shake my head. I come from a long line of sarcastic snide verbal joking and that means I lean towards the absurd anyway.
For me this documentary serves the purpose of dissecting where the taboo boundaries lie today. In a world of censorship and polite and cute comedy like Friends, or Full House this joke and the telling of it is clearly cathartic, at least for the comedians.
I actually think watching this documentary is a good idea. You learn something about the nature of comedy, censorship – both internalized and societal – and about what makes you laugh as a pure defence mechanism. Then again, I like it when things get complicated, so if you’re looking for just “funny” you should probably stay away from this one.
Mule
