Displaying items by tag: Billy Connolly

THE BOONDOCK SAINTS: ALL SAINTS DAY

US, 2009, 118 minutes, Colour.

Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, Billy Connolly, Clifton Collins Jr, Julie Benz, Peter Fonda.

Directed by Troy Duffy.

This sequel definitely presupposes audience knowledge of the first film. In 1999, the original focused on gang warfare in Boston, details of the Boston Mafia and the Italian culture, criminals as well as on the McManus family, and the Irish Mafia.

In both films, the McManus twins, very much a product of Irish Boston, son of a killer, and exercising vigilante violence against their enemies, were played by Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus. And the father is played by veteran Billy Connolly.

While there is a very different opening for this sequel, the rest of the action when the brothers return from Ireland to Boston is very much in the vein of the first film, the picture of the various branches of the Italian Mafia and their crimes, internecine violence, Judd Nelson appearing as one of the leaders.

There is a setup involving the death of a priest in Boston, a hired killer but the murder set up as imitating the style of the McManus twins. This is a situation to draw the brothers who have been working on farms, to come back – and, on the boat on the way, they encounter part of the Mexican Mafia in the form of Clifton Collins Jr and his Mexican connections. He becomes part of their team.

The McManus family has a priest cousin in Boston who comes to Ireland to inform them about the murder. At the end of the film, when he gives some kind of refuge to the FBI Agent who oversteps the bounds of the law, played by Julie Benz, he is seen to be in connection with the detective from the first film, played by William Dafoe, whose death has been faked and who is still living quietly but with influence on combating crime in Boston.

Many of the scenes are quite over the top in terms of violence, glee of the brothers and their Mexican ally in the violence, the FBI agent at her toughness and rivalry and then collaboration with the detectives who were working with the brothers 10 years earlier.

The crass language of the dialogue is incessant, may be taken for granted by the characters portrayed, but much of it too much and too constant for the audience. And, it might be noted, that there are a lot of verbal attacks on enemies using homophobic slurs, something which pervades the attitudes of the McManus family.

During the film, there are flashbacks to the history of Noah McManus, a young man, diffident, witness to murders, changing in his attitude, becoming a killer himself, and eventually living remotely on a farm in Ireland, Billy Connolly. However, as the plot progresses, it is revealed that his past friend and then enemy, deadly enemy, Louis, is now nicknamed The Roman and has engineered the situation, the murder of the priest, to lure Noah back to the United States and confront him.

There was to be a third episode and the Wikipedia entry is a detailed history of the on-again – off-again progress of this project.