Last Blog On The Left

Ten years ago Troy Duffy directed a flick called ”The Boondock Saints”, which was pretty enjoyable and I guess that some people regard that movie as sort of a straight-to-video classic today. I have to admit that I have seen it more than once. It´s not like it´s “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” but I think it´s a pretty fun flick. But after it was released, something weird happened: writer-director Troy Duffy was in a nuclear accident and as a result of this he did not get any super powers but his ego ballooned to a size that mankind had not witnessed before! All this is documented in the excellent documentary “Overnight” (except for the nuclear accident thing. Apparently they left out that part), and his career was pretty much over. Until now, that is, when the much delayed sequel “The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” have finally been released.

To be honest, I never thought that this one would see the light of the day. If you´ve seen “Overnight”(and if you haven´t I once again urge you to watch it. Seriously, do it!), you are familiar with the fact that this Duffy fella has quite the mouth on him, and he´s been going on and on about this movie for ten years now with not much happening so I thought “Yeah right, Troy Duffy, I´ll believe it when I see it”.

I have seen it now, so I guess that I have to believe it. One thing I can´t believe though is how disappointed I was with it. I almost wish that Duffy didn´t got this one made and then we could continue fantasizing about what movies this guy would make if he only got the chance, instead of actually watching them! I liked to think of Duffy as this almost mythical figure and what if the guy is some sort of misunderstood genius? I mean, the first “Boondock Saints” showed that he obviously was a guy who could spin an entertaining yarn and he definitely knew his way around a camera, right? It was a fairly confident exercise in style considering that it was his first movie. Hell, he could be the Orson Welles of Tarantino-inspired action flicks, for chrissakes!

As it turns out, I was wrong. I don´t know what Duffy´s been up to all these years but he sure as hell hasn´t been fine tuning this script. It´s surprisingly clumsy and unoriginal, considering that he´s been gestating on the thing for ten years now! But I gotta say this: the guy gives the fans what they want. At least, if what they want is basically the same thing all over again.

The movie starts with the MacManus brothers (still Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery) living on Ireland with their father (Billy Connolly), and a bunch of sheep (sheep). They seem to have some sort of contest going on regarding who can grow his beard the longest, because they look pretty shitty. Kinda like those homeless guys you see in the park sometimes. Anyway, the brothers have to bow out of this contest because they have to go back to Boston because someone is trying to frame them for the murder of a catholic priest. And then blah blah blah…

You know the deal, the brothers go back and they start killing off gangsters to the left and right. It turns out that the gangster ruling the city this time around is the son of the one they killed in the first one and he´s played by the wild kid dressed in black from “The Breakfast Club”, Judd Nelson. Christ, I guess I always knew that that kid would end up bad but I never thought it´d go as far as this, that he´d end up a goddamn kingpin in Boston! I wonder what Principal Vernon would say if he knew about this.

Like I mentioned earlier, you can´t fault Duffy for not giving the fans what they liked in the first one but that´s about it! The attempts he does at expanding the mythology doesn´t work very well so you lose interest in them pretty quickly. For instance, the back story of Il Duce is Duffy´s attempt at creating a “Godfather Part II”-style story of how an innocent Irish immigrant is forced into crime to make ends meet, like Don Corleone back in his day. The problem is, Duffy ain´t no Coppola, even though he surely thinks so himself and the guy he´s found to play the young Billy Connolly sure as hell ain´t no Robert De Niro. He´s not even the Robert De Niro-on-autopilot that we saw in “Godsend”. Hell, he´s not even the over-the-top Robert De Niro that we saw in “Rocky and Bullwinkle”! That´s how uninteresting this guy is, unfortunately.

I think that one of the reasons why the movie sits so badly with me is this: it´s hard to appreciate it after you´ve seen “Overnight”. The first “Boondock” was a fun Tarantino-rip off with some over-the-top, hardboiled dialogue but when you watch “Overnight” you realize that “Holy crap, this is the way that this Troy Duffy-guy talks in real life! He really thinks he is a Boondock Saint!” That´s why some of the scenes in this movie made me very uncomfortable, the main one being the dream sequence in which Rocco from part I appear. They´re standing in the middle of a hockey rink and screaming about how they are men and “real men do not cry, real men don´t pout, real men jack you in the jaw and John Wayne didn´t talk about his feelings because he died with five pounds of undigested red meat in his ass” and so on and to be honest, this is one of the more embarrassing scenes I´ve seen in a long, long time.

The reason why I found this so embarrassing isn´t because I object to what the characters is saying or anything like that (which I do, for the record). If I would´ve seen this scene in another movie I probably would´ve found it pretty funny, but like I mentioned: it just isn´t funny when you know that this is writer-director Troy Duffy expressing his inner most thoughts to us, the audience. This is probably the emotional depth that this guy has to offer his surroundings.

Then we have the fact that this dialogue is being spoken by Reedus, who hasn´t aged one day since the first one, and Flanery. Now, Flanery has probably aged quite a bit and decided that the process of growing older wasn´t for him so he looks like he´s Botox-ed the hell out of his face! And I don´t think that these two got any direction at all during the making of this movie because all they do is basically scream their dialogue. I´m not saying that the first one is some sort of masterpiece of nuances but at least Reedus and Flanery didn´t act like they were part of some shitty summer stock revival. All this adds up to what is the most embarrassing sequence so far this year.

But Reedus and Flanery aren´t the only ones guilty of supersized acting in this one, oh no! Clifton Collins, JR, who is usually a reliable performer throws all caution to the wind acts like he´s trying to beat Nicolas Cage in a contest to see who is capable of the widest grins and loudest screams. I guess he´s supposed to be the comic relief sidekick of the movie but I´m not sure. He´s not particularly funny and neither are the three returning detectives Dolly, Duffy and Greenly but you get the sense that Troy Duffy himself finds every one of their lines hilarious!

Then there´s Julie Benz from “Rambo 4” and “Dexter”, who plays an FBI agent named Eunice who´s investigating the case and for some weird reason she speaks with a southern accent that´s worse than Brad Pitt´s Irish one in “The Devil´s Own”. There´s no explanation for this and the only one I can see is that Troy Duffy probably found this funny, in some weird way. Hell, even Peter Fonda shows up toward the end and he does the worst accent of them all. You´re not gonna believe your ears…

I guess that if I hadn´t seen “Overnight”, I might´ve enjoyed this one a bit more but I sincerely doubt it. So maybe it was wrong of me to recommend it to you at the beginning of this rant? Let´s play it like this: watch this one first and if you like it, don´t watch “Overnight” because if you do, your image of Troy Duffy and ability to embrace anything he might make in the future will be forever tarnished. If you don´t enjoy it, seek out “Overnight” immediately to fully grasp what weird universe this man lives in!

Well, at least he got this one made, which is pretty impressive after all. You gotta give him that! It doesn´t give him any credit that in ten years time, this was the best script he could come up with, though. Maybe he´ll vindicate himself in part III, which we´re promised at the end of this one?

A special mentioning should go out to this guy Bob Rubin who plays a character called Gorgeous George. Now, out of all the examples of overacting that is on display in this movie, this guy takes the prize! If Troy Duffy can sit around and watch dailies with this guy in them and not realize something is very, very wrong, he really is out of his mind. No doubt about it.

Until next time: take scare!

Thomas

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 7:24 am and is filed under Action, Comedy, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.