The Boondock Saints

Tired of the crime overrunning the streets of Boston, Irish Catholic twin brothers Conner and Murphy are inspired by their faith to cleanse their hometown of evil with their own brand of zealous vigilante justice. As they hunt down and kill one notorious gangster after another, they become controversial folk heroes in the community. But Paul Smecker, an eccentric FBI agent, is fast closing in on their blood-soaked trail.

Critics largely dismissed The Boondock Saints on release as a Tarantino knockoff more concerned with staging inventive executions than saying anything about the vigilante violence it gleefully endorses — yet audiences ignored that verdict entirely, turning a film that barely scraped $30,000 in theaters into a genuine cult phenomenon worth tens of millions in home video. The gap between critical contempt and popular devotion is the defining fact of this film's life.