The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day ( *1/2 )

October 29, 2009 8:29 a.m. EST

87 minutes

In theaters October 30, 2009

Rating: R, Thriller

Troy Duffy has returned to the Boondocks.

The Boondock Saints, that is, the director's flop 1999 crime thriller that disappeared from theaters in a flash, but then became a cult phenomenon and racked up sales on DVD.

The sequel, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, brings back the Irish brothers, fraternal twins played by Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery. This time the vigilante/assassin siblings return from Ireland to seek vengeance for the death of a priest.

The MacManus brothers, Connor (Flanery) and Murphy (Reedus), have been living quietly on their father's (Billy Connolly) sheep farm in Ireland, out of reach and out of touch, for the last eight years.

But when they find out that a Boston priest whom they both greatly admire has been murdered in their trademark manner so that they are implicated as the killers, they decide to bring their kind of justice to those responsible and clear their name in the bargain.

So they return to Boston, set up revenge shop, and begin killing in earnest. Along the way, they pick up a partner named Romeo (Clifton Collins Jr.) and meet an FBI agent named Eunice (Julie Benz), who is working with the same Boston cops the brothers encountered back in the day.

Writer-director Duffy -- the ex-bartender who created the first one and was the subject of a 2004 documentary, Overnight, that alleged his boorish ways and tyrannical directing style -- plays to the Death Wish crowd, leaving no room for disapproval of the bloodletting or the amorality on display. The movie embraces violence in the name of its target audience.

With style trumping content in virtually every scene -- nowhere more than in the laughably showoffy Look-Ma-No-Hands slo-mo-gunplay sequences -- Duffy lends the film a pomposity that makes you wonder if he thinks his film will supplant Citizen Kane as the most impactful and influential cinematic work of all time.

It's not easy to be taken with any movie so taken with itself. And for no good reason.

You get the impression watching TBS2:ASD, which is essentially a shoot-em-up, that everything is filler except -- that is, that no one behind the scenes cares about anything but -- the numerous action scenes, which are highlighted and focused upon like choreographed song-and-dance numbers in a musical comedy. As for the rest of the narrative, it's sketchy, confusing, and thematically pretentious -- as if anyone within the zip code of the film is really addressing the nuances of religion or spirituality, or wrestling with notions of good and evil.

Just just about everything in this vanity exercise in Tarantino-esque style is overblown. And that includes the acting by just about everybody, including the guest cameo performers, whose appearances in the third act are intended as surprises of a sort for fans of the original, but which are, to say the least, too little too late.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is an odious ode to violence and vigilantism.  By the time the saints come marching in, we're already looking forward to marching out.