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"  Instead of spending my post-Halloween afternoon recovering in bed, I thought it slightly more respectable to set foot outside my apartment and recover at the movies. And having already seen Where the Wild Things Are, I submitted to sitting through the new Boondock Saints sequel. I&amp;#039;ll spare you the indignity of a formal analysis (a statistical one tells you all you need to know, anyway) and politely suggest that it was just way too long. Five minutes in I was so thoroughly unentertained I couldn&amp;#039;t help but wonder: who the hell gives unnecessary sequels the green light, anyway?  The original Boondock Saints was a cult success. And cult successes become cult successes because they sync with the counter-culture at a given point in time. The first movie got big because it was able to disguise an Irish-American-Catholic morality play in a pre-Dan Brown, pre-molestation-scandal mob narrative, which, when paired with Tarantino-esque B-movie violence, flattered the Good Bad Guy fantasies of a generation of young men who grew up in awe of Vincent Vega. (It also obscured the fact that we&amp;#039;ve already seen these sort of redemptive themes in better, less self-indulgent flicks \u2014 this one, for example). Well, that and the fact that Willem Dafoe was brilliant in it; his flamboyant crime scene operatics were what really made it a success.  But there&amp;#039;s no reason for Boondock II to exist \u2014 except to make money, which, on just sixty-eight screens compared to Michael Jackson&amp;#039;s nearly thirty-five hundred, it didn&amp;#039;t. And so it doesn&amp;#039;t capture the imagination at all. Worse, it somehow dilutes the authenticity of the original (which, let&amp;#039;s be honest, was kind of eh at best anyway). As a moviegoer, it&amp;#039;s more than a bit insulting, especially ten years after the fact, to be served such an obvious slice of commercial pie. Unless a franchise has wizards, hobbits, Robert Downey Jr., or God forbid, substance (see: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II), we&amp;#039;re better served when Hollywood practices some humility and keeps these sorts of films at one. RELATED LINKS:  THE ENDORSEMENT: The 90-Minute Movie GALLERY: 10 TV Shows That Should Never Be Movies PLUS: Why It&amp;#039;s Okay for Hollywood to Adapt Every Franchise on Earth "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6695/boondock-saints-2-review-110209/>