The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day

Review By: Ryan Hamelin
RyanHamelin@TheCinemaSource.com

Movie Grade: B+

This is one of those unusual cases when I’ve found myself really enjoying something while simultaneously admitting that, on a conscious or logical level, it is entirely a guilty pleasure. I’m a huge fan of The Boondock Saints, having rented it on a whim one dark and rainy night and saw it with no hype and no clue what I was actually getting into. It’s a favorite for me because of how completely ludicrous it is; how it revels in its action set pieces, and how painfully funny it managed to be in between the bloodshed, keeping us rooting for the vigilante brothers despite their violence. Having the cops show up at the destroyed crime scene and flashing back to what actually happened is still one of my favorite uses of that particular filmmaking cliché, and I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of that kind of scene construction since.

All that being said, fans have been awaiting a follow up to the original film for an entire decade now. The script was written a while back but legal disputes and other issues had caused it to hang in limbo, waiting for the big break that would finally get the sequel on theater screens near you. About a year ago, the legal battles finally concluded, the cast and crew got back together, and they set out to rekindle the kind of movie magic that only gets better with time. Unfortunately for them, the anticipation has also reached a fever pitch, and had the sequel come out only a few years after the original, they may have been able to exceed the hype (suffering Indiana Jones 4 syndrome here). Instead, they’ve buckled down and done their best to continue on a tried and true formula, to varying degrees of success.

In the Q&A which followed the film, Troy Duffy said that his original cut of the movie was over 3 hours and 10 minutes long. The version we saw was around an hour and 40 minutes. Duffy believes that a director’s cut will come out on DVD at some point and for his sake, I hope he’s right because the biggest problem with the film was in its editing. The beginning is extremely rushed, as though whole scenes were snipped down to one or two line clips, and it feels like the kind of lets-get-the-boys-back-to-Boston-sooner note that a studio executive would give. After everything calms down and the story settles into a natural pace, it’s like we’ve returned home again. Most of the jokes hit the mark, the action scenes are enjoyably off-the-wall, and all the characters you’d expect to see come back in some capacity. There’s even one extremely memorable cameo towards the end of the film which will surprise the audience and exhilarate the fans. I’m never going to give that one away, simply because it was worth having to pick my mouth up off the floor.

After so ...