At this point in my movie-going life, I can think of a long list of things I’d rather watch than a group of hardened big-city cops waxing poetic about loyalty.
So Pride and Glory, to put it kindly,
might not have been the film for me. A chatty, overlong slog, its many
characters are preoccupied with where a police officer’s true
allegiance should reside, and they talk about it. And talk about it.
Then shout about it. Then talk about it some more. A few shots are
fired, some punches thrown, but mostly it’s talking.
The film
follows a family of cops: patriarch Frances Tierney Sr. (Jon Voight);
his sons, commanding officer Frances Jr. (Noah Emmerich) and detective
Ray (Edward Norton); and son-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell), a patrolman.
Pride and Glory opens with a bang, as Jimmy, Ray and Frances are
called to the scene of a bloodbath that has claimed the lives of four
of Frances Jr.’s men. The city and the department are in an uproar, and
Ray signs up for the special investigative unit assigned to the case.
But he gets more than he bargained for when he finds out that the trail
leads right back to the boys in blue, in particular to Frances Jr. and
Jimmy, who are tied up to varying degrees in a cops-for-hire scheme.
It
seems local gangsters are renting badges to use as muscle, and the deal
is spinning out of control. It gets a bit more complicated, and the
jargon-heavy script makes it all a bit hard to follow, but those are
the particulars.
This set-up leads to plenty of second- and
third-act rumination on what Ray should do with the knowledge of his
brothers’ misdeeds. With Internal Affairs creeping in the shadows,
should he do right by the city he serves? Or should his familial bonds
restrain him? Is blood really thicker than water? You’ve probably seen this good-copbad-cop routine before, and there’s nothing about Pride and Glory to
recommend it above other tarnished badge yarns. One of the more amazing
things about this story is that it actually took four guys to come up
with it, and one of them Joe Carnahan. He wrote 2002’s Narc, an
excellent, bare-knuckle genre piece that stayed one step ahead of the
viewer, and was highlighted by one the best performances of Ray
Liotta’s career.
Carnahan’s latest is nothing like that taut bruiser. Pride and Glory needed
about two fewer writers and a more strict editor to trim 30 or 40
unnecessary minutes off the final product. The film spends a lot of
time navel-gazing, and director Gavin O’Conner doesn’t have the sense
to reign in his cast’s melodramatic tendencies. There’s a lot of
blatant overacting here — Emmerich is probably the worst offender, but
he’s by no means the only guilty party — and it gives the film an
artificial weight. This problem is exacerbated by a few plot points —
Ray’s estranged wife, Frances Jr.’s wife with cancer, Frances Sr.’s
pretty-obvious alcoholism — that ultimately add nothing to the film but
phony gravitas.
In the end, Ray is the classic honest cop
stuck in a no-win situation by a few loser colleagues who happen to be
his flesh and blood. There are a lot of feverish lectures about loyalty
and honor, a lot of envelopes stuffed full of dirty money, a lot of
righteous “you broke my heart!” speeches from one brother to the next.
It’s been done a million times, and while Pride and Glory is mainly mediocre, its crowded plot and overwrought acting drag it under.
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