‘All Saints Day’ Fails to Live Up To Hype

Many movie sequels alienate viewers because they rehash parts of their predecessors in a way that bores fans. While Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is guilty of this, it attempts to avoid the issue by introducing a number of new elements. The problem with the fresh ingredients director Troy Duffy adds to the mix however, is that they are the primary reason this movie is so bad.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the cult classic Boondock Saints, the film follows Connor and Murphy, a pair of brothers from South Boston, who share a vision of God commanding them to go forth and punish criminals. Known as the Saints, the brothers take on Boston’s criminal element exacting a deadly brand of vigilante justice. Joining forces with their long-lost father Il Duce, the brothers kill a mob boss in broad daylight, and disappear into obscurity.

Picking up a couple of years after the first movie, the McManus brothers have been living peacefully in isolation with their father on the family farm in Ireland. Connor (Sean Patrick Flannery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus) learn of a priest’s murder back in Boston, and they decide to seek retaliation against the guilty party. Perpetrated by the mob, the murder is meant to frame the Saints and to coax them out of hiding so that the crooks can have a shot at revenge against the vigilante family.

After a montage of gun cleaning, hair trimming, and bathing, the brothers are ready for action again, on a cargo ship back to the United States. Duffy never really explains how the brothers end up on the boat, but we see them make a new friend there: a scrappy Latino named Romeo (Clifton Collins Jr). When Romeo discovers the brothers’ identity he begs to join their ranks. Sticking to their silly nature, Connor and Murphy insist Romeo must go through a series of initiation steps before he can fully become a Saint.

Probably the best new addition of the film, Romeo carries a child-like sense of pride that he is now with the Saints, almost as if he’s excited the big kids are letting him tag along. A truly goofy character, he worries more about looking cool and feeling like a badass when he’s in the heat of battle, than he does about the moral implications of his actions. Even though he isn’t always funny, a fair number of the movie’s more humorous moments come from the brothers joking around with him.

Willem Dafoe’s character Agent Smecker is not present, but his protegé steps in to investigate the priest’s murder. At first the Beantown cops who helped the Saints before are skeptical about trusting Special Agent Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz). Eventually they learn that Bloom knows more about their past than she initially lets on.

As a character though, Bloom is a terrible replacement for Agent Smecker because she embodies every annoying Southern stereotype. The worst example of this involves a scene in which she’s wearing a full cowboy outfit firing a six-shooter.

From an overall plot standpoint, All Saints Day tries to do too much.  Instead of making the story simplistic like Boondock Saints, Troy Duffy tries to make this one a bit more complex. He weaves a web of intrigue surrounding Billy Connelly’s character Il Duce and his shadowy past. Attempting to make Il Duce’s background more complicated does not benefit the audience, because Duffy never fully explains the motivations of Il Duce’s friend turned nemesis.

Il Duce’s story is told through a series of flashbacks, but these flashbacks don’t appear to have any pattern. They are a fractured set of sequences, that fail to fit in with the pacing of the rest of the movie.

Largely referential to the first film, it feels at many moments as if should be parodying itself, but sadly it isn’t. There are a number of flashbacks to moments from Boondock Saints, jokes based on references to it, and appearances from characters like the bar owner with turrets. The brothers’ dead friend Rocko comes back as a sort of supernatural figure, appearing to the brothers in dreams and narrating to the audience. While I personally liked all of his lines, I felt his presence as such a character was not in keeping with the foundation laid by the first movie.

My biggest criticism of the film was that it was just too wacky; it had too many out-of-place moments that did not match up with the more grounded aspects of Boondock Saints. These wacky moments were inconsistent at best, and resulted in a very bizarre rhythm the plagued the entire movie.

✭✭ ½