John Wayne was the subject of one of the strangest scenes in a Norman Reedus film

Troy Duffy’s 1999 film “The Boondock Saints” caused a slight stir in the independent film world when it was first released. It’s an aggressively masculine film about two Irish twin brothers, played by Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus, who become Punisher-like vigilantes and take it upon themselves to chase Boston away from the Russian mafia. There are a lot of masculine postures, a lot of verve and many, many bullets fired. “Saints” had a surrealist side, highlighted by the Catholic faith of the two protagonists. It was an American version of a Guy Ritchie film. It didn’t make any money at the box office, but it was a boon for home video. There was a time when every white male between the ages of 17 and 22 owned a DVD copy of “The Boondock Saints.”

Troy Duffy was particularly… assertive when he made the film. The man was a braggart and an egotist, all captured in the 2003 documentary “Overnight.” College-aged bros everywhere loved “The Boondock Saints,” and it seems fitting that it came from an outwardly toxic dude like Duffy.

In 2009, Duffy returned to direct “The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day,” hoping to recapture the magic. The sequel was not as well received by fans and hated by critics, but it still managed to make money at the box office, something the first film failed to do.

Near the end of “Saints II,” there’s a really bizarre fantasy sequence that serves to emphasize the ultra-masculinity of the characters. The two MacManus brothers are sitting in a bar smoking, when their deceased friend David “The Funny Man” Della Rocco (David Della Rocco) appears and raves for several minutes straight about how they need to draw masculine energy from the ghost of John Wayne.

You can tell that the Funny Man sequence is a dream because the color fades, indicating that we are one step away from reality. The MacManus brothers are sad and gloomy when David steps in with his floppy hair and sunglasses to give them a pep talk. All three compare a dead compatriot (I won’t say who) to legendary movie actors like Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and, in their words, “Duke F***ing Wayne.” Rocco then extols the aggressiveness and destructiveness of the male gender, and the camera pans them to fantastical locations, like rooftops and underground parking lots.

The speech, spread among them, reads as follows:

“Men build things, then we die. It’s in our fucking DNA! It’s what we do! And when it all falls apart? We build it again. But this time bigger! Better!” [Looking out over the city] Look! Look what we can do. Look how beautiful we are. Do you think the men who built all this had it easy? Tough men! Doing hard shit! And it makes me hard! But not in a gay way or anything. […] I’m so sick of all this leftover twelve-step self-help hippie generation bulls***!”

Twelve-Step’s rejection of “soft” language, it will likely be noted, mirrors some of the dialogue in David Fincher’s “Fight Club,” released the same year as the first “Boondock Saints.” But where “Fight Club” was a dissection and deconstruction of unhealthy, old-world male bluster, “The Boondock Saints II” signifies it.

Echoes of Denis Leary’s 1992 album “No Cure for Cancer” can also be heard, particularly a song he recorded called “A**hole.” In this song, Leary raves about how the world has become too wimpy and how he aimed to thaw a cryogenically frozen John Wayne back to his manhood. John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin and Sam Peckinpah were also on the “crew”, revealing that Leary turned to a certain genre of ultra-violent films to obtain his masculine ideals.

The characters in “The Boondock Saints II” agree with Leary, 17 years after the fact. They believed Wayne was masculine specifically because of his ability to suppress emotions, continuing:

“Now they don’t want you to do anything, do they? Sit there. Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t drive fast. Kiss my ass! Fuck! Do it all, I say! Do you think Duke Wayne spent all his time talking about his feelings with a fucking therapist? There’s no way you can do it! John Wayne died with five pounds of undigested red meat in his ass. Now, he’s a man! Real men hide their feelings. Why? Because it’s none of your fucking business! Men don’t punch you in the jaw and say “Thanks for coming out.”

It’s a strange fantasy sequence in an already stylized film. It sounds like a poem, and chances are ambitious theater students have transcribed and performed the speech as an audition for their college play. If not, someone should try.