A trip to the boondocks

I chose to sharpen the knives for a film that has repeatedly, in the past week, been brought up to me as 'a good movie'. The standard response to a Boondock fan is that it is redundant of Pulp Fiction. Which, at its core is a mineral that is still being mined to this day with the likes of Smokin' Aces.

It took a director to plunge the adrenaline shot into cinema for a new look on the crime genre. Needless to say, it was fuckin' trippy what transpired afterward. In its wake, hundreds of screenwriters tried to mimic its formula. Dressing characters up in a suit with shades. Or having two Irish hitmen spout religous diatribe while their rivals meet the business end of a pistol.

The heart of Pulp Fiction lay in not what we've seen in movies a hundred times before but what we haven't seen. The stuff that would get left on a cutting room floor. The kind of scenes that would have two hitmen go on a dialogue about toes before they enter. It's also the kind of scenes where the comfortable silences are suddenly punctured by a shot to the face. The violence is fast and quick. The wit twice as fast. There's no Dafoe running around in drag re-enacting a 'firefight'.
The plot of two religous hitmen declaring their own brand of vengeance turns out to be, as one reviewer so eloquently noted, a serial killer movie. Not a vigilante movie.

A fan of Boondock Saints should be familiar with its director Troy Duffy. In that sense they should also be familiar with Overnight. Here is the story of a man who became bartender to movie director. Though his oversized ego would destroy his career. Someone handed a huge opportunity and flushes it down the toilet.

The problem with the film as it stands? Saints feels like it was written by a bartender who has seen his share of movies. As opposed to a former video store clerk who already wrote two scripts called True Romance and Reservoir Dogs. & if I ever needed proof to that, the man would 'come back' with an an even worse offender: Boondock Saints: All Saints Day. To quote Duffy "As for my film career, get used to it. Cause it ain't going anywhere. Period."

Overall Grade: D