THE BOONDOCK SAINTS

dMYD DVD

Starring Willem Dafoe

Trailer

M

A singular vision is a wonderful thing, obstructed and hidden from the unrelenting march of popular opinion as it is. It’s cowering in the corner and mumbling its views to itself in a Scots accent because it can do whatever the hell it wants, it answers to itself and the kilt isn’t for fucking show. However, give that vision some money, a camera and the streets of New York City and it can break out from its lonely hovel, forcing itself upon an unsuspecting world like a prick in an eye: it can be as nightmarish as that sounds. Cinema-nineties kicked off with an indie revolution led by Citizens Tarentino and Soderbergh and gurgled off into the 2000s with a slew of copycat gangster crap that regurgitated the tropes of six years earlier; The Boondock Saints splashes lightly into this violent slurry with its stylistic lunges at gang punching and quip-talking but performs the whole thing with the daring curveballs of being Irish and slightly batshit. Thus we have Willem Dafoe as a cross-dressing detective, Billy Connelly as a mute psychopath and a lot of people you’ve never heard of attempting accents they’ve never heard. It’s original, it’s odd, it’s so off kilter it’s drowning in the North Sea and very little of it makes sense. That doesn’t make it good, but it does make it special. It’s always a pleasure to see something so defiantly inept that it’s an island of its own; all the tropes and treats of the action movie are here somewhere, they’re just being buggered by classical music and ham-fisted explorations into Catholic guilt, as well as the bizarre physics and leaps of logic last seen in X-Men rather than Pulp Fiction. You won’t believe your eyes! Now dig them out.