DVD Reviews

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day – Blu-ray Review

By Frankie Dees Mar 16, 2010, 13:28 GMT

From Troy Duffy, writer and director of The Boondock Saints, comes the much anticipated sequel to the tough, stylized cutting edge saga of the MacManus brothers (Norman Reedus, Sean Patrick Flanery). The two have been in deep hiding with their father, Il Duce (Billy Connolly), in the quiet valleys of Ireland, far removed from their former vigilante lives. When word comes that a beloved priest has been killed by sinister ...more

Writer/Director Troy Duffy is back with the long-time coming sequel to his dorm-driven cult pic ‘The Boondock Saints.’

Despite a decade to fine-tune the return of the MacManus brothers and a clearly larger budget to play with, Duffy struggles to inject any originality into the film and instead falls back on whatever energy and good-will was generated from the first one.

The first pic was a lively love it or hate it bit of action ridiculousness that either tired you out or swept you up in it’s everything but the kitchen sink approach - not the least of which was Willem Dafoe’s seriously demented and OTT performance as a Fed.

Duffy is clearly trying to reinvent the magic here (for those taken with the first one at any rate) and is able to succeed intermittently during the first half, but the film is too long and Duffy seems a little too sold on his own ambitious in scope but lacking in details narrative.

After the fairly open ending of the first pic where the MacManus bro’s, Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus), team up with their once estranged father Poppa (Billy Connolly) to reap justice on criminals, the opening of ‘The Boondocks Saints II: All Saints Day’ finds all three on a farm in Ireland seemingly living out a quiet life as farmhands.

With long bushy beards and ho-hum attitudes, it’s clear the bros are anxious to get back in action and the opportunity arises when news arrives that an old Beantown neighborhood priest has been executed in their m.o. – gunshots to the head, pennies over their eyes. Someone is attempting to frame them and lure them back to Boston, and the MacManus brothers don’t hesitate to hop on the next ship back.

Stowing themselves on a cargo ship, they meet up with a wildcat Mexican fighter Romeo (Clifton Collins Jr.). He also hails from Boston, considers himself a fan of their work, and volunteers himself in their quest for…well, vengeance I suppose. With word spreading through the Boston mafia that the Boondock saints are back, the mafia gets nervous and goes on the offensive.

When the Boondock Saints do indeed show up and wreak some havoc along with Romeo, the pic settles down into a reworking of the first one complete with a new but equally insane Fed character, Dafoe’s protégé Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz).

She is a stiletto heel wearing, hip-shaking, southern-accented FBI detective who thrives on emasculating the local Boston detectives - who make their goofy return from the first one. Recreating the crime scene just like Dafoe’s character did in the first one, she even enlists a cowgirl costume for one such quickly tiring device.

This all builds up to an anti-climatic confrontation with a mob boss known only as ‘The Roman’ who is played by the billed Peter Fonda in a sequence that is meant to carry the tension of, say, the final moments of ‘Kill Bill: Volume 2’, but instead makes little impression as Fonda isn’t given any juicy dialogue and frankly comes off as bored.

What works and carries over from the first one is the charisma and rapport of the leads with Flanery, Reedus and Connolly all really seeming to enjoy themselves and Collins Jr. making a fun, if racist, addition to the protagonist cast.

The first half keeps the energy up with that same slightly off-center comedy/action mix that made the first one a hit, but it ultimately wore me down with less effective retreads of sequences from the last pic and a formidably unnecessary running time.

Case in point: I would have lost the complete ‘Godfather: Part II’-like subplot that tries and fails to add some scope and depth to Connolly’s Poppa character. The subplot has the audience checking out a flashback of what led Poppa down such a violent career path. The film ends on what can only be called a cool moment intertwined with a cinematic threat as if this is Duffy’s ‘Godfather: Part II’, god help us for his ‘Godfather: Part III’.

The 2.35:1 AVC encode is quite good with the visceral action getting the appropriate detail and everything from the gorgeous vistas of Ireland to the dark shadows of bars getting a vivid presentation. The DTS-HD 5.1 aud mix keeps up with the video and is as pounding as bombastic as the movie. That being said, if the movie annoys you then so will the soundtrack.

Special Features include two feature-length aud commentaries with the first including writer/director Troy Duffy and actors Norman Reedus, Sean Patrick Flanery and Billy Connolly. This track gets points for the sheer energy on display but I’m also taking some points away as little actual info is gained – this track is mostly a lot of bad jokes and inside references.

The second is Troy Duffy by himself with Willem Dafoe oddly joining around the half-way mark and will be of more interest for those actually wanting to learn about the film.

Some quick ‘Deleted Scenes’ that don’t add up to much as well as short featurettes ‘Billy Connolly & Troy Duffy: Unedited’ where they go so far as to compare ‘Boondock Saints’ as the film equivalent of rock & roll. Ahem.
‘The Cast Confesses: Secrets from the Set’ takes a look at the Bro’s new tattoo’s and ‘Inside the Vault: The Weapons’ checks out weapon props man Charles Taylor as he shows the various weapons used in the film.

Better is the half hour ‘Unprecedented Access: Behind the Scenes’ which is a lively behind-the-scenes piece and the almost hour-long ‘The Boondock Saints Hit Comic-Con’ which gives us a inside look at the craziness that comic-con brings for even moderately interesting genre pics.

For rabid fans of the first film, I’m sure this pic will sate their Boondock needs if certainly not expand on them and is probably worth a rental for that purpose alone.

Yet, Duffy had a decade to really hammer out a great script and all he manages to do is reiterate what came before. The main cast was certainly game which keeps the film afloat for a while but it’s ultimately not enough. Let’s hope Duffy learns a few new tricks by 2019.