Preliminary remark: the comments refer to a pre-release version that was shown at the "Fantasy Film Festival" in Cologne, Germany, in August 1999.
"Boondock Saints" is a clever, funny, sufficiently violent movie with an overall high entertainment value. The story revolves around two Irish-American brothers and an excentric gay FBI agent (awesome: William Dafoe). The brothers - devout Catholics - who speak several languages fluently and work in a slaughterhouse find themselves equipped with money and weapons and subsequently start their very own crusade against the evil men of Boston - professional killers, mafia bosses and drug dealers. The agent is at their heels from the outset, but he has to realize that justice is on the side of the brothers...
This basic plot is the foundation for a highly energetic narrative: we get excellent and at times highly comic dialogues (with a high F***-word ratio), running gags, and lots of crazy situations and plot developments that are as absurd as they are funny. The action/shooting scenes are well-choreographed with a fine eye for the detail, but it's the main characters, their dialogues and developments around which the movie is develops rather than the action sequences.
On top of this, we get a fractured time/place structure that's already familiar from movies such as Kubrick's "The Killing" or Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs", but "Boondock Saints" takes it to new extremes - and thus it's fun to watch.
Of course, the characters are a bit shallow every now and then and one would love to learn more about their background, but that's only a slight criticism. Overall, and measured by its own intention, "Boondock Saints" is great entertainment. More, it doesn't need to be.
