PRIDE & GLORY

“PRIDE & GLORY” (Edward Norton, Jon Voight, Colin Farrell & Noah Emmerich)
Odd title for a film about a whole lotta corrupt cops!
It’s all in the family fuzz-style as Edward Norton & the under-rated Noah Emmerich play brothers, Ray & Francis Tierney. Jon Voight plays their father, also a cop & Colin Farrell is Jimmy, brother-in-law to Ray & Francis, Son-in-law to Mr. Tierney. Francis heads a precinct – Jimmy leads one of his units. Ray, who was shot in the face a couple of years earlier holds down a safe desk job – until 4 of Jimmy’s men are found dead in an abandoned apartment. Dad ‘insists’ that Ray take on the case as the lead investigator to ‘get back in the swing of things’. Of course, what Ray discovers is that Jimmy is a crooked cop & Francis either has his head up his rump, or is in on Jimmy’s illegal doings.
When Francis is caught in a flat out lie to his brother on the identity of the cop that ‘blew the whistle’, Ray can only assume that Francis is not to be trusted either. Meanwhile Dad wants Ray to ‘do the right thing’ & ‘protect his own’ – which in this story is a contradiction in terms. Okay, so the dialogue is somewhat hackneyed at times, but it almost makes up for it with some fine acting by Norton & Emmerich, some decent acting by Colin Farrell, who hopefully has discovered he can’t handle a lead role & his future is in secondary characters (So he doesn’t have so much to memorize & is better adept at staying in character)& some so-so walk-thrus by Voight, only showing interest in his character when he has a few too many...
There a few extraneous scenes; such as an elongated Christmas dinner sequence - I’m sorry, I didn’t pay $8 to watch these people eat dinner for five minutes! But on the plus side – Not A Single Car Chase Scene! Now THAT was refreshing! There is a side-plot concerning Francis’s wife who is dying of cancer. It’s a pretty heavy & dramatic circumstance to just be used as a ‘sub’plot – I wanted to know more about the woman & how she became sick & what was her prognosis? Hey, there’s a better title right there, ‘Prognosis: Negative” (Oh wait, that might have already been used)
Just before writing this, I watched the ‘new’ Ebert & Roeper review this film & I gotta tell you, those guys are lame! Ben Lyons (Is that his name?) has the personality of a dead sea anemone & the goatee’d dork, though not as offensive as Lyons, reads his lines like George W. reading ‘The Little Engine That Could’. But it was the anemone who, after chastising the film for its lack of originality, claimed he didn’t like it BECAUSE there WEREN’T any car chase scenes! Yeah, that’s what would have made it less like every other bad cop vs. good cop story, a few car chase scenes! Either bring back Roeper or hire Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog to review films, but get these cookie-cutter milquetoast morons off of my TV – I need to watch that show to find out what some of the lesser publicized films are about & I can’t get a good read on them from this pair of twits... Anyway, off the soapbox & back to ‘Pride & Glory’ – Its worth seeing if you're an Edward Norton fan, the scene where he tells the ‘committee’ ”You’re not going to like what I have to say” is captivating & gives you hope that this film might offer up an exciting original finale... it sort of delivers on orginality, but it isn’t without its flaws & contradictions.