As chronicled in the documentary Overnight (reviewed this issue), the process of writing, selling, hyping, and eventually making The Boondock Saints essentially destroyed the psychic ecosystem of writer/director Troy Duffy. It's only fitting, then, that the film itself, which caused all the tsuris to begin with, would be such a violent, homophobic, tiresome pile of poo. If it were good, the story of its ill-fated birth wouldn't be nearly as satisfying. (Nor would Duffy's utterly oblivious commentary track, which is way more entertaining than the movie itself.)

The movie plays like an extended pitch from the imagination of someone whose primary interest lies in getting a screenplay sold: Okay, there's these two brothers, right (Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus)? Devout Irish Catholics, with neck tattoos and guns. They do everything together--praying, working, even smoking simultaneously. They live in a squalid loft and work in a meatpacking plant (where sometimes they hit each other with sides of beef and punch out the ornery bull dyke who likes to kick people in the balls). They also kill "evil" people, with all the righteous vengeance of the Old Testament, much to the delight of their Boston neighbors. Too bad for them that a gay FBI agent (Willem Dafoe) is hot on their trail.

Too bad for anyone who goes into this movie looking for something more than a cinematic atmosphere and gratuitous gunplay. Though it's easy to see why Hollywood might have signed off on the pitch, the execution is a botch job; Duffy fails to present a single interesting or credible character, and even the generic '90s carnage feels slack. You have to give a measure of respect to anyone who gets a film made, but Duffy cashes that check before the credits are over. The rest of the movie is as dumb as a rock.