I find it absolutely repugnant that Troy Duffy’s mixture of comedy, profundity and over-the-top violence is considered by some to be “Tarantino-esque.” These elements co-exist within a single consistent tone in Quentin Tarantino’s work. He has some kind of perspective toward his subject matter. In Pulp Fiction, for example, he portrays the crime world as a universe where you can get shot coming out of the bathroom or your head could end up being splattered in the interior of somebody’s automobile. It’s absurd and that absurdity is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. I think Jules’s conversion to the spiritual life at the end of the film might in some ways be a copout and a way to justify the rest of the film. I don’t think that Pulp Fiction is necessarily a moral picture. But I do think that the spiritual elements in that film are borne from this worldview that the world is an absurd place and that maybe if there is some kind of organizing intelligence to the universe it all wouldn’t seem so terrifyingly random.

Duffy’s The Boondock Saints is considerably more insincere. It gave me a better idea of why some people rejected Pulp Fiction on the grounds of nihilism. Duffy’s killers are two vigilantes setting out to clean the streets of evildoers and he makes them holy figures—literally “saints.” Tarantino argues that rejecting a life of violence can start one on the path toward spirituality. Duffy takes the exact opposite position. Violence, against the guilty to protect the innocent, is the most spiritual act a man can commit. By destroying the wicked, the “Boondock Saints” get closer to God. In fact, Duffy believes that not taking up arms against evil men is an immoral act. He begins the film with a priest giving a sermon describing the death of Kitty Genovese who was stabbed to death in front of an apartment complex of non-responsive tenants. The priest concludes that "...there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men".

Here are a pair of serial killers who kill for the “greater good.” They’re altruistically violent. Rather than eliminating the social conditions that create criminals or even helping the victims get back on their feet or grieve, Duffy defines altruistic moral behavior as killing “evil” people. I’ve seen some people criticize the description of the vigilante genre as “fascist” by saying that the films don’t meet the dictionary definition of the term: “a system of government characterized by dictatorship, centralized control of private enterprise, repression of all opposition, and extreme nationalism.” Well, The Boondock Saints in particular might not be a de facto fascist film, but it’s somewhere in the same ballpark. A society that lionizes the Boondock Saints (for Pete’s sake, they’re saints) is certainly on the fast track toward fascism. In championing vigilantism as the highest moral good, as specifically altruistic, Duffy is bringing us together through our hatred of a common enemy. Not to mention that the concept of “punishing evil” is always a slippery slope and can easily slide into “repressing all opposition.” Notably, the end credits show local news interviews with Boston residents about whether or not they approve of the Saints’ actions. Near the end, a gaggle of people declare that they have “no comment.”

There have been vigilante movies before. In fact, these kind of movies are so commonplace that I don’t even think vigilantism is really a very controversial issue when broached in the cinema. Seeing normal people take the law into their own hands has an escapist appeal to it. What’s baffling about Boondock Saints is how Duffy combines this vigilantism with Catholic iconology to make his killers into holy men. It’s my understanding that Christianity frowns upon “eye-for-an-eye” justice not just because murder for murderers is still murder, but because superheroes like the Boondock Saints take away the criminal’s free agency. At the end of the film, they declare that anybody who kills or steals or otherwise violates God’s law will face their wrath. And so we should follow God’s law for no other reason than the Boondock Saints will kill us if we don’t. The criminal’s possible redemption, his decision to accept Christ into his heart, is then rendered meaningless.

But it’s not just that. This holy, saint-like glow robs Duffy’s killers of any real flavor. They never once question the morality of what they are doing. Nobody does; the vigilantism is considered by virtually everybody in the film as this great idea that nobody has ever thought of before. When the Saints turn themselves in after their first killing and claim self-defense, the officers at the station treat them like celebrities and shyly ask if they wouldn’t mind sleeping over. Willem Dafoe plays Paul Smecker, the detective who is investigating the Saints’ murders. Incredulously, he doesn’t immediately surmise that the killers are the same two who gave him their confession. But when he does find out, he is so impressed with their moral purity that he offers to join their team and help them out.

I’m not much of a fan of the original Dirty Harry, but I mean, that guy was hella dark, right? That film had enough moral ambiguity to give its titular character something of an edge. The Boondock Saints is nowhere near that level of emotional complexity. There’s nothing subversive about the film. Dirty Harry trampled on criminals’ civil rights to deliver cold, hard and mean justice. I’m not even sure that Duffy knows what civil rights are. He doesn’t give us a hint of the moral and social climate that the Boondock Saints’ vigilantism is apparently reacting against. Duffy doesn’t really understand the concept of the anti-hero. He hasn’t done his homework.

Speaking of Dirty Harry, I remember being genuinely shocked by serial killer Scorpio’s graphic description of a teenage girl’s naked body. Where’s the sexual violence in this film? Where are the child molesters? Where is the depraved criminal element that needs to be scrubbed off the face of the earth? The bad guys in The Boondock Saints are bad, I guess, because they belong in the Mafia. The Italian and Russian Mafias to be specific; among his other crimes Duffy is apparently prejudiced against white immigrant groups other than the Irish. One may very well have to go back to American political cartoons from the turn of the century to see more offensive caricaturing of the Italian people. The ethnic cleansing subtext is just another one of those things encouraging a classification of The Boondock Saints under that “f-word.” But anyway, the Mafia villains insist that all black men be called “niggers” and this enables Duffy to work in a boorish racist joke into his screenplay. Ah, and they also go to strip clubs and masturbate. This is apparently another crime worthy of death by the Boondock Saints. After the Saints take down their target, they laugh that maybe they should keep hanging out at this place and just let the “scum bugs” come to them.

Since the film has a significant cult following, I can see some of its adherents explaining to me that I must have missed that the film is a comedy, it’s supposed to over-the-top, and really, I shouldn’t take it so seriously. Well, that’s precisely the problem. Based on a few stray comments in Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith’s worthwhile if profoundly depressing making-of documentary Overnight, I think it’s clear that Duffy intends The Boondock Saints as a serious film on some level. (He apparently greatly disliked Dead Man Walking for trying to get us to sympathize with the Sean Penn character.) But by making it a “comedy,” he gives himself an out for when his film’s legitimacy as a theological and moral argument comes into question. Talk all you want about how intellectually bankrupt the whole thing is, Duffy will come back with “I didn’t really mean any of it anyway.” Again, this is several times removed from the humor in Pulp Fiction which co-existed with the violence to create a absurdly random universe of mere coincidence. Or even from the humor in the Kill Bill films, which I think is affectionate straight-faced kitsch without the attendant campy attitude—much like George Lucas’s Star Wars. Kill Bill and Star Wars are both incredibly naked films. We might laugh because this nakedness makes us uncomfortable; I always laugh just because the whole thing makes me so giddy, but I don’t think anybody laughs because they feel superior to the material.

In The Boondock Saints, Duffy uses humor as a defense mechanism—the true sign of an amateur. If it’s all a joke, he never has to expose his true feelings toward the material. He’s safe. If I want to take his movie seriously, well, that’s just my hang-up. There were several moments early in the film where I concluded that you would have to really hate movies to enjoy The Boondock Saints. That chemical inside most healthy human beings that kind of surrenders itself in the darkness of the movie theater munching on Starbursts and taking in the images projected on that screen… I think Duffy and his admirers were born without it. Or they might have lost it somehow. At some point, I wanted to write that the chief difference between Tarantino and Duffy is that Tarantino has simply seen more movies. That’s not really true; I think Tarantino is the superior filmmaker for reasons outside of his knowledge base. And even to the extent that it is true, it’s just too glib. Tarantino has seen so many movies because he loves movies. You simply don’t see that kind of joy of cinema in The Boondock Saints. Really, it’s a film without any element of joy whatsoever.

When The Boondock Saints was selected for The Onion AV Club’s horrible “New Cult Canon” feature, somebody mentioned in the comment section that they weren’t able to laugh at it because it was just too ugly. Spoken like somebody who really understands the difference between “good” bad movies and just plain “bad” bad movies. There is a sense, I suppose, where the humor does evince an auteur’s worldview. Duffy is a misanthrope. He has essentially made a very hateful film. I asked myself if people are laughing at The Boondock Saints, what exactly are they laughing at? I think they are laughing out of agreement with Duffy.

For example, Duffy cribs the head explosion gag from the last third of Pulp Fiction with an exploding cat. In Pulp Fiction, this was regarded rather amorally as just a really gooey mess in an especially stressful circumstance. This fits in with the tone of the rest of the film as kind of a cosmic punishment for the characters’ blithely nihilistic view toward human life. (Not that God’s punishing them exactly, just that they are reaping what they sow.) In The Boondock Saints, the death of the cat is specifically a moral transgression. The saints, already hardened killers at this point, are shocked and dismayed that this poor kitty lost its life. And so the joke is that the life of a lowlife criminal is worth less than that of a cat. Rather than subverting mainstream movie conventions, Duffy internalizes them in a sick joke that simply panders to his lunkheaded right-wing audience. If you laugh it’s because you agree with Duffy’s reduction of “criminals” as something not only less than human, but less than feline.

I mentioned how Duffy hates Italians and portrays them all as greaseball ethnic stereotypes. (To hammer the point home, he casts Ron Jeremy as the wop that gets it in the strip club.) If you laugh at this, it’s because you hate Italians. The film does nothing to suggest anything so sophisticated as a self-consciousness about political incorrectness. More complicated is Duffy’s take on homosexuality. Smecker is openly gay and rubs this in the face of his subordinates to accentuate their humiliation in, well, being his subordinate and not being the genius detective that he is. Early in the film, when coming upon the murder scene, he puts his hand on his hip in the teapot formation and effeminately tells a junior officer that he would like a bagel with his coffee. He’s emphasizing that the detective/protégé relationship is inherently sadomasochistic and the protégé is always also going to be his bitch. Importantly, whenever Smecker acts “gay” it’s always in a very conscious mocking way. He’s incredibly butch and repulsed by male weakness. In one scene, he’s in bed with a youthful Asian man who wants to snuggle after sex. Smecker berates him for the display of affection, calling him “fag.” Later, he’ll call a swishy gay bartender a “fairy.”

There aren’t really any substantial roles for women in The Boondock Saints. We have the butch lesbian who tells us that the “rule of thumb” came about because men were permitted to beat their wives with rods no thicker than their thumb. (Of course, the Saints tease her about this.) There’s a stripper who screams a lot when she walks into the strip club killing. There’s the strung out girlfriend who cries when she finds her cat killed. That about does it. The picture really doesn’t have much in terms of a female element. It’s a testosterone fest and I think this has a lot to do with the film’s “ugliness.” Duffy apparently hates women as much as he hates Italians. Smecker‘s homosexuality seems to be an extreme manifestation of this misogyny. Duffy sees Smecker as such a macho man that he doesn’t even need to have sex with women! In his perfect world, women would be extinct and men would have sex with one another.

I find the bedroom scene with Smecker and his Asian lover very fascinating. On one level, it depends on a certain homophobic mindset among the audience. Duffy knows that if it were a female lover wanting to snuggle and Smecker rejected her that he would instantly become completely unsympathetic. It’s safer to hate on gay men for having an emotional attachment to sex because it’s incongruent with our expectations of how men should behave. This grossly antisocial behavior is then protected under our derisive laughter toward The Fags. And yet, we have to acknowledge that Duffy has given us a gay character who, if not exactly complex, is considerably more substantial than his caricatures of women and Italians. And of course, no matter how emotionally ugly and jejune that bedroom scene is, it is still a bedroom scene between two men. The film tacitly approves of male homosexuality—if only for the pitcher and not the catcher.

There’s another strange scene where Smecker dresses up in drag and seduces one of the Italian mobsters so he can infiltrate their fortress. He portrays himself as sexy and very vulnerable and just as soon as he can get the bastard where he wants him he goes for the kill. This scenario is familiarly pop feminist. It’s the woman playing the role of the passive sex object and then turning the tables by outsmarting or overpowering the pig taking the bait. Except, you know, this is with a man dressed up like a women. The homosexual provides Duffy with a means to appropriate female victimization and feminist revenge. Combined with the previous bedroom scene we see that Duffy’s hatred toward women runs so deep that he even wants to take away their status as sex objects. (I wonder if part of the film’s cult consists of gays hooting and hollering at the film’s fratboyish homoerotic homophobia. To which I can only say that they should be enjoying Zack Snyder’s 300 instead.)

Of course, Overnight depicts Duffy as a real asshole, but I want to stress that this doesn’t directly inform my hatred toward The Boondock Saints. Quentin Tarantino is likely a real asshole as well, and a film like Overnight could probably be made about how quickly he dropped his old friends at Video Archives, his tactless theft of intellectual property from buddy Roger Avary, his atrocious ego particularly in the afterglow of Pulp Fiction, et cetera et cetera. But I think that perhaps Tarantino is a more interesting asshole. Or maybe he is just an asshole with several more redeeming facets to his personality. Tarantino is a misandrist where Duffy is a misogynist and I guess when it comes down to it, I prefer Tarantino’s misandry.

Like Kill Bill, The Boondock Saints is a film based on Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western archetypes. To paraphrase Danny Peary from Cult Movies, Leone’s westerns (the Man with No Name trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West) are set in a mythical Wild West where gods (Eastwood, Fonda, Bronson, Van Cleef) roam the land dueling with one another. Mortal men (Robards, Wallach) coexist with these dueling warriors, but lacking their Greatness must subsist with their wits and cheap tricks (gun in the boot, gun in the bath, et cetera). In Kill Bill, generally speaking, the women (Thurman, Fox, Hannah, Liu) were the gods. Representing the mortal men was Bill’s brother Budd, who nearly destroys Thurman’s The Bride through a cheap trick instead of in a respectable showdown. In The Boondock Saints, the Saints, Smecker, and an almost silent hired assassin are the gods and a greaseball Italian sidekick (with less moral refinement according to the dialogue) and Smecker’s subordinates are the mere mortals. Obviously autobiographical in light of Overnight, The Boondock Saints is about great men touched with brilliance by the finger of God forced to co-exist with fuck-ups and sycophants.

In formal terms, Duffy doesn’t really pay-off this premise. He doesn’t do enough with the assassin. Not only would I like to have seen more conflict between him and the Saints, but I would like to have seen more conflict between him and the morons who hired him a la Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (or Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men). Duffy knows enough to have Smecker inhabit a flashback of one of the Saints’ shootouts while he re-enacts it in narration, but he doesn’t do enough to sell the idea that Smecker and the Saints are kindred spirits in a sea of mediocrity.

But even it were done well, I suspect that The Boondock Saints would still suck. By identifying with the men (Christian Slater in True Romance, Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs) and portraying their hubris as a kind of fatal flaw (remembering that the Slater character died in his original draft, both men bite it after getting caught up in playing cops and robbers), and of course having strong ass-kicking female characters in his later films, Tarantino betrays a humility that significantly outweighs the arrogance he displays outside of his films. In contrast, Duffy identifies with the supermen, making The Boondock Saints nothing more but the direct actualization of its author’s supreme egoism and, accordingly, insufferably banal.