Last night, in an attempt to broaden my mind and possibly be proven wrong after reading a post here, I watched The Boondock Saints for the first time in a decade to see if it was any good. Long story short, it was not

Things I liked about it:

• Willem Dafoe’s character is a mostly pointless narrative device and a gross homosexual stereotype, but he DOES give a good performance in it
• the chemistry between the two brothers is believable. I could buy the idea that they were actually brothers, and they did their best with the material they were given
• the rule of thumb joke at the beginning (ought to be rule of wrist) which was the inspiration for this post so in that regard I was wrong
• the dead cat
• two of the songs with Irish pipes on them
• Billy Connolly. Enough said

Things I didn’t like about it (pretty much everything else):

• David Della Rocco is simply not funny. I can’t imagine who would have called him the funny guy because he didn’t make me laugh once. His character is stupid, short-sighted, and generally not likeable
• the cinematography is cheap and dim, like bad television from this era. There are scenes where the backgrounds are more brightly lit than the characters faces, which is what you’re supposed to be looking at
• the screenplay reads like a first draft by a 90s frat boy who just saw Pulp Fiction and Snatch for the first time. The really annoying trope is that the story keeps cutting ahead to Willem Dafoe telling the audience what happened when the brothers killed gangsters on 3 separate occasions. It kills the pacing and doesn’t let the audience think for itself
• the rampant racism and misogyny that is supposed to be played for laughs
• the entire message of fighting evil with violence is undermined by glorifying the violence committed by the brothers. It’s like watching some slow-no fantasy by someone who heard violence in movies was bad but didn’t have a point of reference for it
• that I second-guessed myself and spent nearly 2 hours watching a movie that I knew was shitty in an attempt to be open-minded

TL;DR The Boondock Saints has about 6 things I liked in it but not enough to redeem it as a work of cinema, and I feel vindicated af

Submitted September 22, 2021 at 08:27PM by CapeshitConnoisseur https://ift.tt/3kwYkyx