Monument Ave.

Lance: I've got to be honest, I'm a little wary of all these Irish mob movies. I mean, how many different takes can there be on the Irish mob? It's kind of like a mad lib. Guy grows up in [Eastie, Southie, Charlestown]. He or one of his family members is a [car thief, enforcer, gun runner]. Someone [rats on the boss, kills a family member, sells out to a rival gang]. This pisses off the boss, so he sends his thugs to [break the guy's legs, shoot him, drive him around town and intimidate him into silence]. Something goes wrong, and the [Boston Police, State Police, FBI] start snooping around. Etc. etc. etc.

Well, Monument Ave. has all of those, but it's more about life for the Townies in Charlestown than it is about the murder mystery. Denis Leary plays Bobby O'Grady, a low-level car thief in an Irish gang who is deeply conflicted when his boyhood friend and then his cousin Seamus get knocked off by the boss because they are accused of being snitches. The Charlestown way is to keep your mouth shut and look the other way (and there is truth to that, the neighborhood is well known for it's unsolved murders). But can Bobby O'Grady do that one more time? We get lots of close-ups of Denis Leary's mug as he tries to work that out.

Scott: This was an interesting movie. As you said, it's not really about mundane things like "plot" but more about what it's like for the characters to try and live in this environment. With that in mind, it was actually pretty good. If you're expecting a twisty thriller like The Departed, then you're going to be disappointed, but if you're just trying to locate a Denis Leary film that isn't disappointingly bad, then you're in luck. We did have some trepidation that the love interest would fall into the Carey Treatment trap of being totally superfluous, but since there's no real plot anyway, that's not a big deal. I'd also say that just by existing she turns up the tension between Leary and his rival, the local mob boss played by Colm Meaney (who, by the way, is great, but also in this film was the only person who had a suspect accent, which was a big surprise to me).

Lance: This movie wasn't at all disappointingly bad; it also wasn't at all popular. Looking at the box office numbers as reported on IMDB it lost so much money that I'm expecting a handwritten note from Leary thanking me for renting it. Just five million more rentals until he starts seeing residuals.

Oh, and congratulations on referencing The Carey Treatment again. I believe you do so in every review. Since we're referencing previous movies on the list, I'll take this opportunity to note that Monument Ave. also played a role in Mystery Street, as the wrongly accused suspect and his wife lived on Monument Ave.

One last note/question from me. There is a scene where the crew from Charlestown comes across a black man walking down the street and kidnaps him briefly in a successful attempt to intimidate him into leaving. In it, the O'Grady character showers the victim with all sort of racial epithets, including one that I don't think I'd ever heard until a Boston cop used it in reference to Henry Louis Gates. Is that just a Boston thing? Do you think this scene was even important? I'm not sure what it is supposed to say about Charlestown.

Scott: That was an interesting scene in that the character who was going nuts with the racial slurs and pointing a gun to the African-American guy's head was apparently doing it in an attempt to make the other guys in his posse realize how stupid their racism was. I think from a character point, it was mainly to expand upon the idea that O'Grady has outgrown Charlestown but doesn't seem to be able to find a way out of it. It comes right on the heels of the scene where he's trying to chat up the yuppie woman and instead gets completely undermined by all his townie connections butting in and ruining things for him. This scene is more of the same: he's sort of moved beyond this knee-jerk us vs. them mindset, but everyone around him is so stuck in it that they don't even realize what they're really saying or doing. In that sense I didn't have an issue with the scene even though on the surface it was pretty jarring.