Metacritic Film

Boondock Saints, The

Starring Willem Dafoe, Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, David Della Rocco, Billy Connolly, David Ferry, Brian Mahoney, and Bob Marley

MPAA RATING: R for strong violence, language and sexual content

Indican Pictures
Crime
110 minutes | Color
USA / Canada
Released In Theaters January 21, 2000

Two Catholic vigilante killers from Boston (Flannery, Reedus) who believe they are doing God's work kill members of the Russian mob and customers of a porn shop, but instead of paying for their crimes, they are praised as "saints" by the local newspaper and by an odd FBI agent (Dafoe).

WRITTEN BY
Troy Duffy

DIRECTED BY
Troy Duffy

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

44 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 Boston Globe Joan Anderman
(Duffy) navigates the twisted collision of religious faith and the thrill of the kill, altruism and brutality, with an ingenious mix of humor, horror, mysticism, and just plain hipness.
60 Variety
More interested in finding fresh ways to stage execution scenes than in finding meaning behind the human urge for self-appointed righting of wrongs, (the film) is stuffed with effects that have no lasting impact.
50 LA Weekly
(Duffy's) assembled a fine cast -- it's hard to take your eyes off the two young leads -- but he's given them little to do but squeeze triggers and mouth platitudes.
30 The Onion (A.V. Club)
As written and directed by newcomer Troy Duffy, The Boondock Saints is all style and no substance, a film so gleeful in its endorsement of vigilante justice that it almost veers (or ascends) into self-parody.

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