The Boondock Saints (1999)
Directed by Troy Duffy
Tired of the crime overrunning the streets of Boston, Irish Catholic twin brothers Conner and Murphy are inspired by their faith to cleanse their hometown of evil with their own brand of zealous vigilante justice. As they hunt down and kill one notorious gangster after another, they become controversial folk heroes in the community. But Paul Smecker, an eccentric FBI agent, is fast closing in on their blood-soaked trail.
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Not since James William Guercio on Electra Glide in Blue (1973) has a supposed wunderkind disappeared so quickly.
This is far from an original concept (ever heard of Natural Born Killers?), but the idea is at least intriguing.
Duffy, fuelled by the same urban dismay that led Paul Schrader and Andrew Kevin Walker to pen the vigilante fantasies Taxi Driver and Seven , respectively, hammered out a screenplay about two Boston brothers who take revenge on the local Mafiosi, which sold on spec to Miramax for $450,000.
Worse, Duffy suggests some Brundlefly splice of Tarantino and another key influence on Sundance-era filmmakers, Edward Burns: The Boondock Saints is like a head-on collision between Pulp Fiction and The Brothers McMullen , making the film the perfect all-purpose bookend for the independent cinema of the nineteen-nineties.
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Worse, Duffy suggests some Brundlefly splice of Tarantino and another key influence on Sundance-era filmmakers, Edward Burns: The Boondock Saints is like a head-on collision between Pulp Fiction and The Brothers McMullen , making the film the perfect all-purpose bookend for the independent cinema of the nineteen-nineties.
Despite being his first screenplay, both studios were convinced The Boondock Saints was going to be the next Pulp Fiction, and writer-director Duffy the next Quentin Tarantino.
"Reservoir Dogs" created a sub-genre of crime suspense copycats, of which Troy Duffy's "The Boondock Saints" (1999) is one of the most embarrassing examples.
But what we are left with could be described as Reservoir Dogs -lite.
Basically Duffy takes the screenplay for “The Blues Brothers” and works it to fit his action fixation while enlisting about every goofy one-liners and plot device you can actually imagine (Duffy obviously made one character a Tourette’s sufferer to squeeze in extra foul language).