There’s something revealing here: As belief in the Bush way of thinking has soured, the stock in Boondocks has skyrocketed, despite bearing a worldview that is thoroughly, boorishly Bush-like.
An initial casualty of post-Columbine cowardice, Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints has become an unlikely video hit in post-9/11 America. There’s something revealing here: As belief in the Bush way of thinking has soured, the stock in Boondocks has skyrocketed, despite bearing a worldview that is thoroughly, boorishly Bush-like.
In the 1999 original and its belated, terribly similar sequel, two good Irish boys (played by charisma vaccuums who’ve barely worked in the interim) announce themselves as Angels of Death and seek to wipe out, in the most badass, post-Tarantino way possible, Boston’s mafioso—but not before going to church and praying to their god. (You know, like good little terrorists.)
Like our former president, Duffy’s worldview is “clear-eyed,” his morality black-and-white: Here is good and here is evil. The issue of vigilante justice is reduced to a simple question of action vs. inaction. In Duffy’s eyes, you’re either for citizens gunning down people in the streets or you’re a pussy or, worse, a queer.
In the four hours of Boondock saga, there’s no drama: Our saintly (though totally assholish) heroes never waver in their mission, never once question that fighting evil with evil is at the very least questionable, never slightly improve their Cro-Magnon vocabulary. And because they barely sustain a couple minor flesh wounds—despite roughly 10,000 fired bullets—what’s the point in watching exactly?
Duffy hasn’t changed in the decade between Boondocks either. As the scandalous story goes, the former (and future?) bartender landed a fairy tale deal with both Harvey Weinsten and Madonna’s Maverick Records (for his band). He blew both spectacularly thanks to his awesomely inflated ego.
And yet Duffy remains Duffy, and Boondock 2 is basically Boondock 1, only with the addition of a minstrelly Mexican comic relief (Clifton Collins, Jr.), Peter Fonda with an Italian accent and hammy Willem Dafoe replaced by hammy Julie Benz, whose show Dexter offers a complex, unsettling view on vigilantism that renders these films even more obviously bullshit. Please let its blowhard filmmaker be stupid enough to piss off the few industry friends he has left. D+
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