BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over again from "A Most Wanted Man". Sure, I would have loved to save this one for St. Patrick's Day, but I just can't be sure if I'll be able to loop back to this one in time. The romance chain tends to run a bit past February and will probably extend into March, but that's about as far as I've programmed. I'd hate to leave this one unwatched and then find out I can't link to it by March 17, so it goes here. St. Patrick's Day is a state of mind, after all, it's just coming early for me this year.
THE PLOT: Two Irish Catholic brothers become vigilantes and wipe out Boston's criminal underworld in the name of God.
AFTER: I've been a bit curious about this film for a while now, it's got something of a cult following, and of course I've never been sure exactly why, because I hadn't seen it. Anyway, no time like the present and all that - it turns out to be a cult film about a couple of cult heroes, within the film these two brothers achieve legendary status with their "take no prisoners" vigilante attitude. For them, it's easier to actually kill 'em all and let God sort it out.
When they start out killing all the criminals they can find, initially it is sort of self-defense, by that I mean they picked a fight with the Russian gangsters trying to close their local pub, and after humiliating the Russians in a bar fight, the next day the Russians came looking for revenge, and at that point, it was probably kill or be killed. Umm, if that's the choice, then you go with "kill", I guess. But the brothers find that they have a flair and a talent for this, especially when it comes to sneaking into mob hideouts, killing everybody that they find inside, and then covering their tracks, from a forensic point of view.
Willem Dafoe plays one of those forensic specialists, a federal agent who can mentally reconstruct a crime scene just by looking at the evidence, THIS bullet hole in the wall or where THAT slug landed. The movie uses this to great effect, we the audience don't always see the shootout scene happen until AFTER the federal agent has figured it all out. So this is actually quite clever, if we heard the agent describe the scene after we all saw it happen, that would be boring. By placing the scene after, basically just to confirm the findings of the police investigation, suddenly it's exciting again, and we all go into it knowing a little bit about what to expect - laws of time, space and movie editing be damned.
By the end of the film, the two scenes are cleverly combined, so the forensics expert is acting out the scene WHILE the scene is taking place, it's like he was edited into the flashback (though, of course, he was probably just filmed in it) or the camera will cut back and forth between the vigilantes killing everyone in the room and the agent acting it out, playing all the parts. I don't think I've seen this technique used in a movie before, not exactly like this anyway. The director's instincts were solid, anything you can do a bit differently to make your action shoot-out film stand a little bit apart from all the others is helpful. I bet Quentin Tarantino probably likes "The Boondock Saints".
The brothers are Irish, but their targets are mostly Russian mobsters and Italian mobsters. (I'm sure there's an Irish mob in Boston too, do they get a pass here?). The federal agent acts very frustrated that he can't quite figure out who's killing all the mobsters in town, but there's also a suggestion here that maybe he HAS figured it out, and he tacitly approves of what they're doing, even if he doesn't care for their methods. Obviously, this method of taking out criminals is in sharp contrast to the one seen yesterday in "A Most Wanted Man", where agents go on stakeouts, study case files, pore through security camera footage and use interrogation tactics to gain the trust of smaller criminals to get them to turn on their bosses. By contrast, the MacManus brothers just show up and start shooting.
The FBI agent played by Dafoe is interesting in another way, we the audience learn that he prefers the company of men. So he's gay, but he acts tough, that's a bit ground-breaking for a film from 1999, I think. But he also calls other gay men "fags", which you can't do any more, and this raises somewhat complex issues about whether he loves men or hates men, or a bit of both. Maybe he likes tough gay men, but not effeminate gay men? Does he hate himself, or only other gay men? I think it's complicated - but looking back in history, a lot of Greek soldiers slept with men and boys, and they were all tough guys, one assumes. I admit I'm a bit at a loss here, I don't know if Greek soldiers preferred tough men or soft ones, and I'm not trying to sound disrespectful or flippant about this, I'm genuinely curious about this but it was really a very different time and maybe we don't know enough about this part of history? I can't imagine it's been openly discussed in recent decades, not from that angle anyway.
It all comes to a head when the MacManus brothers, along with Rocco, who's been taking some of the credit for all of their hits, launch an attack on the Yakavetta headquarters to finish off whatever capos are left, and Agent Smecker learns that they're probably walking into a trap, so he's forced to decide if he's for the brothers' tactics or against them. Meanwhile, Il Duce, the secret hitman that the mob calls on when they need to take down one of their own, has been released from jail and the mob's already put him on the trail of the brothers. Everybody meets up for a final showdown, sort of a Mexican standoff. (see, I told you Tarantino probably loves this one...)
I don't want to give away any of the final surprises here, I'll just say that I think I see why this became something of a cult favorite, probably among the same people who were fans of the "Punisher" movie and TV series. Of course there are questions about when it's OK to kill bad people, and also who gets to decide who those bad people are that deserve to die? The brothers seem to find it very simple to make these decisions, but I'm thinking that in the real world, it may be a bit more complicated.
A lot of this was shot in Boston (interiors in Toronto, I think) and I did recognize a lot of sights - the Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston Common and Newbury Street among them. My BFF and I used to take a bus into Boston about once a month, we'd hit one comic book shop and then walk across Boston Common, cut through the Copley Plaza Hotel and then hit the other comic book shop on Newbury Street. This was also a great place for him to buy ties to wear at work while I picked up some Playboys at the vintage magazine shops, when I was 14 or 15.
Also starring Sean Patrick Flanery (last seen in "Powder"), Norman Reedus (last seen in "Triple 9"), David Della Rocco, Billy Connolly (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Bob Marley, David Ferry (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Brian Mahoney (last seen in "First Man"), Richard Fitzpatrick (last seen in "Breach"), Tom Barnett (ditto), Robert Pemberton, Bill Craig, Layton Morrison, Scott Griffith, James Binkley, Matthew Chaffee, Robert Eaton, Gerard Parkes (last seen in "Trapped in Paradise"), Dwayne McLean (ditto), Jonathan Higgins (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Carlo Rota, Ron Jeremy, Viktor Pedtchenko, Lauren Piech, Gina Sorell (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Sergio Di Zio (last seen in "The Lookout"), Angelo Tucci, Jimmy Tingle (last seen in "Clear History"), Dick Callahan, Carmen DiStefano, Dot-Marie Jones (last seen in "Patch Adams"), Christopher Flockton, Joe Pingue (last heard in "The Nut Job"), Kevin Chapman (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Nicholas Pasco.
RATING: 6 out of 10 peepshow booths at the Sin Bin
No comments:
Post a Comment