In the spring of 1997, a beer slinger/bouncer named Troy Duffy hit the aspirant-filmmaker lotto when he sold his gritty screenplay The Boondock Saints for $300,000 to Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, who promptly attached Duffy to direct, agreed to let his band do the soundtrack and, as a goodwill bonus, even offered to buy and throw in co-ownership of the Melrose Avenue bar where Duffy worked. If Schwab’s was the old symbol of Tinseltown discovery, this was a radical new overhaul for the post-Tarantino age of underclass, videostore-fed auteurism.

Cut to a couple years later. After enduring months of Duffy’s boorish, bizarre behavior, and all manner of contretemps over casting and budget, Miramax put the film — about two avenging angel Irish brothers and the Latin they intone before blasting various criminal-types in the head — into turnaround, and dumped it back into the marketplace, mortally wounded in reputation. It would eventually get made on a relative shoestring budget, suffer an ignominious, deservedly bashed New York/Los Angeles theatrical release and find on video a small, drunken audience addicted to a surfeit of late ’90s, indie-style posturing. All of which brings us to this two-disc DVD release of The Boondock Saints, ostensibly prelude to a not-nearly-long-enough-awaited (direct-to-video?) sequel.



The story centers on Connor and Murphy MacManus (Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus), blue-collar Irish twin brothers who work in a Boston meat-packing plant and experience a religious awakening that leads them to believe they’ve been chosen to rid the world of evil. But as they unleash a brutal stream of retribution on various burly, Russian underworld criminals, FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe), leading the investigation into the assailants behind these bloody murders, comes closer and closer to cracking the case and, surprisingly, finds himself torn between busting the vigilantes and joining them.

An orgiastic assemblage of genre clichés you’ve seen hundreds of times before, from balletic gun shoot-outs and slow-mo deaths to block-headed, epithet-fueled dialogue exchanges, The Boondock Saints does score some minor points for making Smecker gay, an interesting character choice that sets him apart from most lawman-types in movies of this ilk. But its story is a bunch of blarney, and its rendering both garish and amateurish.

Housed in a nice, faux-metallic case that evinces an iconic look, this unrated special edition of The Boondock Saints extends the film’s blood and mayhem by only a few scant minutes. The primary disc houses one of the main points of interest, an audio commentary track from Duffy that is at times borderline contrite, but also willfully abstruse when it comes to specifics about the project’s fall from grace. Hardcore devotees to the title may find tidbits about the haphazardness of the movie’s set detail and construction interesting, but Hollywood rumor junkies will feel largely unfulfilled by this track. Duffy can be amusing, as when fondly recalling a two-page letter from the archdiocese of Toronto calling him “the spawn of Satan,” but he showcases his functional unawareness of production savvy when confessing first choices for various musical cues came from the Beatles, the Doors and Led Zeppelin, and then expressing surprise at their cost. He’s also amazingly myopic; Duffy still blames the Columbine shootout for scuttling the movie’s chances at a wider distribution pick-up, and claims it was “literally blacklisted” from American screens, like it was some sort of international smash.

Co-star Billy Connelly, who plays enigmatic assassin Il Duce, also sits for a separate audio commentary track, but his remarks deteriorate rather quickly into generalized observations about low-budget, independent filmmaking. The set’s second disc includes a clutch of deleted scenes, outtakes, the original theatrical trailer, cast and crew filmographies and a printable copy of the movie’s shooting script, all the better to read along and see exactly how many expletives were improvised, I suppose. D (Movie) B+ (Disc)