The Boondock Saints ★★★½

VIGILANTE thriller The Boondock Saints is all over the place in many ways, but still a very enjoyable watch.

Since its initial 1999 release when it flopped at the box office, this American/Canadian film has slowly achieved cult status to the extent that it spawned a video game.

Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus play Irish fraternal twin brothers Connor and Murphy MacManus.

The pair scrape out an existence on the dangerous streets of inner Boston through various jobs, some involving criminal acts, until a bar brawl that elevates into a shoot-out and the deaths of a couple of Russian mobsters.

With the police and organised crime on their heels, the MacManus boys decide to increase their public profiles even further by becoming vigilantes ridding the city of other violent criminals in the name of the greater good and God.

The strategy seems to be working with their notoriety attracting as much support as condemnation from the public, but their greatest threat comes when the Russians unleash a secret weapon, legendary hitman Il Duce, who would give The Terminator a run for his money.

The acting is at best uneven, at worst completely over-the-top with shouting at each other the main method employed. Many of the characters are unbelievable and their motivations can shift without explanation.

It’s badly edited at times and the transitions between both current scenes and to flashbacks are very clunky.

But, despite all this, writer and director Troy Duffy’s three-ring circus remains an entertaining opera of violence and madness highlighted by the inspired casting of Willem Dafoe as a singing, cross-dressing FBI agent and Scottish comedian Billy Connolly as the silent, relentless hitman starting public gun battles at the drop of a hat.

Back in the day, the film received a lot of grief for glorifying violence, but its way too comic to get worked up about.

Watched on Prime.