"Would they harm an innocent person?" "The Irish guys would never."

ROUTE 1 and reader STACEY recently swapped DVDs.
She borrowed "YINGXIONG BENSE (A BETTER TOMORROW)" by John Woo, we borrowed "THE BOONDOCK SAINTS" by Troy Duffy.
The irony is the similarity of the films.
Both the Hong Kong and the Boston films feature literal or figurative brothers on a quest to right wrongs, both films use innovative ways to present stylized violence and both plots progressively ebb away from reality, until they conclude with climaxes that border on dreamlike.
As I watched "The Boondock Saints," I decided that Duffy made this film like a film student who has been dying to make a film. He deploys a myriad of (sometimes gratuitous?) camera angles, liberal use of flashbacks and painstaking attention to diegesis -- a film study term referring to the details in the world's of the characters. If you watch the film, check out the details in "Funny Man" Rocco's apartment, and you will see how much time Duffy spent getting the diegetic details.
Leads Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus are returning this year -- a decade after the original film's limited release -- to star in the sequel to "The Boondock Saints."
It's a pity Willem Dafoe couldn't be persuaded to join them, as he stole most his scenes in the original.
Dafoe wouldn't join, eh? Perhaps the brothers should have tried the old tie-them-to-the-bar-and-light-their-butt-on-fire trick?