Aspiring screenwriters know the "Cinderella" story behind Troy Duffy's script for The Boondock Saints. Duffy, fuelled by the same urban dismay that led Paul Schrader and Andrew Kevin Walker to pen the vigilante fantasies Taxi Driver and Seven, respectively, hammered out a screenplay about two Boston brothers who take revenge on the local Mafiosi, which sold on spec to Miramax for $450,000. As part of the deal, the "mini-major" negotiated to purchase the pub where Duffy worked on his behalf, and they agreed to let him helm the picture. But as a famous director in a diplomatic mood once told me, "You can't always take Miramax at their word." The studio dropped the project, Duffy, and the watering hole over alleged casting disagreements, leaving Elie Samaha's Franchise Pictures to pick up the slack.

The Boondock Saints went, for all intents and purposes, straight to video, where it's now seeing its second release on DVD. Perhaps that would be an unhappy ending five, ten years ago, but nowadays, a six-million dollar production seeing any kind of distribution is miraculous. And frankly, this six-million dollar production coming as far as it has, well--whatever led Harvey Weinstein to buy a bar to acquire The Boondock Saints isn't readily apparent. The film plays out like the last vestiges of the misinterpretation of Tarantino cool, especially in its flip violence and an FBI agent character whose queerness is there to authorize casual homophobia, though the great Willem Dafoe brings his usual verve to the role.

Worse, Duffy suggests some Brundlefly splice of Tarantino and another key influence on Sundance-era filmmakers, Edward Burns: The Boondock Saints is like a head-on collision between Pulp Fiction and The Brothers McMullen, making the film the perfect all-purpose bookend for the independent cinema of the nineteen-nineties. Said Irish brothers (Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flannery, both admittedly charismatic) consume copious amounts of wince-inducing liquor, go to mass, and seem to have a policy against changing a shirt once it's been bled upon (perhaps a by-product of their slaughterhouse job), but they're not fleshed-out beyond their essential protagonistic function. At some point the pair adopts a third, more manic saint, Rocco (the same-named David Della Rocco), who gives the movie a sour, misogynistic charge from which it never recovers.

Wounding The Boondock Saints most of all is its editing: a gratuitous use of fade-ins and fade-outs--one could easily mistake scenes for trailers or R&B videos during a channel surf--is Duffy's dunderheaded idea of montage, stripping the film's non-linear structure of grace and confidence. The Boondock Saints, sorry to say, wasn't worth the drama.

Fox's SE-style reissue of a bare-bones DVD from a company called Pid contains a non-16x9 transfer of The Boondock Saints letterboxed at 2.35:1; besides a lack of anamorphic enhancement, the image suffers from weak black level and the 'jaggies' (jagged edges caused by too much sharpness), while the 5.1 soundmix is muddy at times, with music often competing against the dialogue for attention. (Maybe because certain pieces were written by Duffy's band, The Brood.)

Duffy utters next to nothing of that ill-fated Miramax deal in his feature-length commentary track, but he does clarify a nonsensical "baptism" dream sequence for us to the best of his abilities. Eight deleted or extended scenes (including an unexpurgated version of a number in which the brothers beat up a lesbian trainee at the slaughterhouse) of rough video quality, a one-minute-and-thirty-second passage of outtakes, The Boondock Saints' redband trailer, and director & cast filmographies (in Duffy's, we learn the reaching fact that he honed his craft through extra-curricular essays assigned by his father, a Harvard professor) round out the disc, whose menus are in 5.1.-Bill Chambers