If you are a person of a certain age, you probably have quite a history with “The Boondock Saints.” The 2000 film about vigilante brothers taking on bad guys in Boston quickly became a cult hit after its release, with dorms and high school bedrooms all over the US being adorned with posters of stars Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery. And for years after, you had to hear your friends say things like, “Hey bro, did you see ‘Boondock Saints?’ That shit is so cool!” A decade later, the sequel film, ‘All Saints Day,’ was a big critical and commercial bomb, leading many to believe the franchise was gone forever. Well, not so much.
According to Deadline, more than a decade after the terrible sequel and more than 20 years after the first “cult” hit, writer-director Troy Duffy returns with a third “Boondock Saints” film. Not a lot of details are known about the plot, other than the film picks up with the brothers in jail, which happened at the end of ‘All Saints Day.’ The third film will see the return of the aforementioned stars, as you might expect, and the hope is to turn “Boondock Saints” into a “John Wick”-style action franchise. You know, because dudes with tattoos on their hands killing the hell out of bad guys is so fucking cool, and needs its own franchise, right?
“The fans have loved these characters for 20 years,” Duffy said. “They use terms of endearment like ‘the Brothers’ or ‘the Boys.’ We left them in jail at the end of ‘Boondock 2’ and fans want to know what happened to them. Norman and Sean have been a driving force to keep this franchise on track and break some new ground story-wise. The fans have been waiting. They literally ask about it daily, and I am really excited to be working with Impossible Dream to make ‘Boondock III’ a reality.”
He added, “Where we’re going is, the brothers are older. They are coming out into a brand new world that is not like the one they left. They are at odds. One wants to continue, the other doesn’t. There’s a new enemy out there, not like the traditional ones they’ve faced. That’s the thing that is timely about this one. I asked the fanbase once, who would you most like to see Connor and Murphy kill? There were like 4500 answers, and some were Biblical; people just don’t give you one word answers. The number one answer was, politicians. I wrote a scene right now where one of them says, are you fucking kidding? You can’t kill a politician and the other saying, are you kidding me? They’re the ones doing it. It turns out one guy is doing it much worse than everyone else. Without getting too deep into the story, what it is is, two boys coming out of prison after staying there much longer than expected, to a brand new world. They’re at odds on whether to push forward. But the type of people we face today in our society, is unlike any we’ve faced before. And that brings them together and they say, we cannot turn our backs on this.”
No release date for “Boondock Saints 3” has been announced, but Duffy hopes to begin filming next year. If you’re unfamiliar with the previous films, you can watch the trailers below: