Billy Connolly names his favourite Billy Connolly movie: “It’s a brilliant one”
When people picture the Glaswegian legend Billy Connolly at his peak, it’s usually as a stand-up comic, and one of the very best to do it during the 1980s and ‘90s. But aside from also being an accomplished musician, he was also an actor who made a good number of movies, over fifty in fact, and he was going as far back as 1975.
“The Big Yin” had worked his way up from theatre in his native Scotland to becoming one of the hottest new stand-ups when he made his movie debut in 1978’s gritty Catholic priest expose Absolution with Richard Burton. And over the next ten years, he mixed his main love of live comedy with the occasional film, starring with Michael Caine in 1985’s Water and then putting his pointy goatee to the test in The Return of the Musketeers four years later.
By the time the 1990s came around, Connolly was probably the most successful stand-up comedian in the UK, and had global recognition too, regularly selling out tours in Australia and attracting the attention of Hollywood, where he started to make cameo appearances in movies like the Demi Moore and Robert Redford blockbuster Indecent Proposal in 1993.
One of his biggest roles that decade was opposite Judi Dench in 1997’s Mrs Brown, his performance in which attracted considerable acclaim and earned him a BAFTA nomination and a Screen Actors Guild award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. Then, two years later, came a movie that many still have as one of their favourite underground hits more than 25 years later, the 1999 action thriller The Boondock Saints.
Starring Willem Dafoe and a very young Norman Reedus of future Walking Dead fame, it’s a vigilante movie set in Boston that tells the tale of two twins forced to defend themselves after killing two Russian mafia members in self-defence. One religious experience later and the pair decides to clean up the city in the name of God while the FBI trail them chaotically.
Connolly plays Noah “Il Duce” MacManus, the twins’ father and a notorious mobland assassin released from prison to convince the pair of the error of their ways, only to end up helping them out. Connolly said of the film: “I loved it – there was a lot of shooting and killing. We didn’t like the way the world was going, so we were getting mafia guys and killing them. That was filmed in Vancouver. It’s a very violent film. But it’s a brilliant one.”
By all accounts, the film was actually made in Toronto and Boston, so it seems his memory might be slightly out, but we can forgive him for that. The Boondock Saints proved to be a curious film on release; it barely made it into movie theatres and, due to various legal issues, wasn’t put out on DVD until 2006. Critics didn’t like it at all, and even now on Rotten Tomatoes it has a score of just 26%. But a look at the audience score of 91% tells the other half of the story.
Over a two-decade period, people began to let it be known how much they loved the film, and it was released again and again in different formats and cuts, eventually bringing in more than $50m in proceeds and becoming a true cult classic. In 2009, a sequel was made, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints’ Day, featuring many of the original cast. It performed moderately well, and for the last ten years, a third instalment has been in development.
