The Boondock Boondoggle

Connor and Murphy McManus (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus) are two brothers who work in a meat packing plant. They are proud of their Boston Irish roots, and have disdain for the forces of organised crime, and when they stand up to some Russian mobsters and have to take desperate measures to escape with their lives intact they become lauded as heroes. On more or less the drop of a hat, they decide that they have been chosen by God to dole out justice to evildoers in the world.

When people do that in real life, they become known later by names such as “the Yorkshire Ripper“, but since this is an action movie with a stance on vigilantism which makes the most braindead Death Wish sequels seem nuanced this is absolutely fine, just the best possible use these boys could find for their time. Still, law enforcement feels a certain obligation to check up on things when entire hotel suites full of dead bodies are discovered, so eccentric FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) must at least go through the motions of investigating their activities, only to find himself increasingly persuaded that they are on the side of right.

Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints is very much a Boston film, and more specifically a Boston Irish film; this is unsubtly driven home with the way that the film opens on St. Patrick’s Day and the title sequence entails shots of Boston landmarks set against Irish folk music (and the brothers beating up a co-worker at the meat packing plant they work at because… er… she points out something misogynistic and they get really aggressive at her about it) before we wind up at an Irish pub.

Then the initial conflict which kicks off the action comes down to a group of Russian mobsters trying to shake down said pub, which prompts a brawl which prompts reprisals from the Russians – forcing the brothers to extremes in self-defence. With the mobsters slain and the actual killings clearly being an instance of the brothers defending themselves, the police and public see the brothers as heroes, and the nod of tacit approval from society and the authorities perhaps plays into the brothers’ decision that God wants them to slay those they decide to be evil.