Pride & Glory finds no correlation between title and content. All the good cops are bad cops; all the good cops that actually are good cops are stupid cops. Riddled with cliché after cliché, Pride & Glory never wanders into anything even remotely resembling originality deciding instead on a well-worn path of departmental corruption and how it affects family as well as the badge. If the audience can find any comfort in the film it’s in the shape of the cast’s decent though clearly half-assed performances.
Ray Tierney (Ed Norton) has blue blood beyond the typical cop requirement – it’s downright genealogical. His brother Francis Jr. (Noah Emmerich) runs the local precinct while his father Francis Sr. (Jon Voight) moved on from the law enforcement scene to a statelier desk job. Hell, even his brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell) is a cop. At least I think he’s his brother -in-law – by the time the whole convoluted family/precinct plot plays out it doesn’t matter who’s related to whom. They’re all equally messed up. When an operation in a local slum goes sideways a few cops wind up dead and Ray finds himself courted to investigate what went wrong. There’s little more to say about the story since you already know how it ends. Corrupt cops. Deepthroat-like confessions. Hoodlums. Riots. It’s all been done and yet somehow Farrell, Norton and Voight all saw something worthwhile in the film to sign on. Someone help me figure it out because We Own the Night didn’t need a remake in less than a year’s time.
Pride & Glory’s meager conflict gets its final boost for the last half in such a horribly predictable fashion that it’s quite simply shameful. As if in an effort to make a by-the-book movie even more derivative, scribes Joe Carnahan and Gavin O’Connor use the oldest cop film ploys that while fresh in the 80s have since become stale (20 year old oreo stale). Yessir – the ol’ fingerprints game. Just shake your head and move on.
Even the film’s soundtrack features your typical urban edge with a mixture of score and rap tracks laced just thick enough to help distract from the recycled plot taking place in dark alleyways and dive bars. All the audio in the world couldn’t save Pride & Glory though – it’s just that bad.
Of Farrell, Voight and Norton it’s the latter’s involvement that has me most puzzled. Norton’s usually pretty goddamn good at picking his fights. So much so that I was hard pressed to think up his most recent off-film - I had to check IMDB. It was either 2002 or 2000 depending on whether or not you thought Death to Smoochy was darkly hilarious or just bad. Norton offers a performance beyond anything the film deserved. He didn’t play down to the material, he elevated it. I honestly feel that without Norton’s presence the film would’ve gone directly to DVD – it should have even as is.
Voight’s performance here surpasses what he’s doled out in the last 5 years. As a stern though jovially semi-retired police captain he gets to sit in chairs with glasses of liquor and play with grandchildren in between small plot-driving bits that ultimately fail. At least it’s not his fault that the plot fails, Jon Voight, like Norton, gives the film more than it deserves.
Then we have Farrell. To say the least: I’m not his biggest fan. He did well for In Bruges but picking up the generic Farrell mantle of an Irish-American cop just feels like a step down from any strides he’s made in the past. If any of the trio phoned in their performance it’s Farrell. Before you defend the man, I only say it because he didn’t really even have to act. He got to play Colin Farrell. Sure he had a cop costume on but that only makes the role so convincing.
Pride & Glory should be noted as the essence of a film that’s elevated by its cast to a theatrical release it never deserved. This is the kind of script submission independent production companies receive on a daily business and pass on because they have no distinguishing features. I assure you there are better corrupt cop scripts sitting in “Don’t Make” piles in every production office in the U.S. Gavin O’Connor, I hope you realize how far in debt you are to the cast of this film.
You hack.
"Pride and Glory" opens October 24, 2008 and is rated R. Drama. Directed by Gavin OConnor. Written by Joe Carnahan, Gavin O'Connor. Starring Colin Farrell, Ed Norton, Jon Voight, Noah Emmerich.
