Destroying Evil So That Good May Flourish
The Boondock Saints stars Sean Patrick Flannery, William Dafoe, Norman Reedus, Billy Connolly, and David Della Rocco. The story begins in a modern day setting, on St. Patrick’s Day. Irish brothers Connor (Flannery) and Murphy (Reedus) McManus are celebrating at a local favorite pub with their friends when the barkeeper tells them the Russian mob is forcing him out of business. Moments later, a trio of Russian mob enter, disrupt the party, and the violence begins from there.
The brothers survive an attack from the mobsters and manage to kill them, but FBI agent Paul Smecker (Dafoe) is on their trail. Meanwhile, the brothers have what you could call an epiphany, realizing that they must destroy evil so that the good people may flourish. With the help of a friend, they arm themselves and Rocco’s character, another friend of theirs with mob connections, helps them locate packs of mob to ambush and kill. All the while, Agent Smecker gets closer and closer to the truth, discovering that these brothers are doing the city a lot of good by killing off all of these bad guys. Technically, it’s his responsibility to bring them in, but he can’t escape the feeling that these brothers are doing the right, moral thing.
Much of the movie is presented in explanations or flashbacks, by Smecker himself. You often don’t get to the see the action first hand until the deed is done and Smecker and his crew come to the crime scene. That is, you see the aftermath of the brothers’ work before actually seeing what they did to reach that aftermath. Once Smecker begins to explain to his inferior local help what happened, then you get to witness the action and you also see how Smecker struggles to decide if he should capture the brothers or not.
The Boondock Saints is a film with a focus on action, although there are some moments of dark comedy and drama, too. It’s fairly easy to see why this film has been so well received by many, although I wouldn’t quite consider myself a huge fan of it personally. Still, if you’re into action movies, especially where the good guys take it to the bad guys pro-actively, you should definitely check this one out.
The Blu-ray Release
Fox brings The Boondock Saints to Blu-ray with both the theatrical and director’s cut versions on a single disc. The actual run time for both is just over one hour and forty-eight minutes, however, so there doesn’t seem to be any additional content in the Director’s Cut. What I also thought was odd is that should you choose to switch between the two versions after selecting one when the disc first loads up, you have to actually quit playback and restart the disc. It’s more odd than a real nuisance, but I thought it worth mentioning.
Regardless of which version you choose, the presentation quality is great. The picture is sharp, vibrant, and without any significant technical problems. The DTS-HD 5.1 audio doesn’t disappoint either, capturing all of the Irish music, screams and dialogue, and of course all of the gun fire, too.
Fox includes several extra features to peruse as well. They include:
-Theatrical/Director’s Cut of the film – Both of these have the same runtime, so I’m not sure what the differences are. I only watched the Director’s Cut and skipped through the Theatrical.
-Audio Commentary – The first audio commentary track includes the Writer and Director Troy Duffy.
-Audio Commentary – There is another audio commentary track with actor Billy Connolly, who played the boys’ father Il Duce.
-Deleted Scenes – A total of seven deleted scenes in SD, adding about twenty minutes of additional content. These scenes are not only in SD, but also show the time code, so they’re pretty raw.
-Outtakes – A minute and a half in SD, including six outtakes.
-Script – The script is presented in still image format that you can scroll through, page by page.
And there you have it. Let’s get to the summary…