Thrills, suspense absent in dreary cop saga ‘Pride and Glory’
You can’t say Gavin O’Connor’s cop melodrama Pride And Glory lacks ambition. It aspires to be no less than a generational family tragedy wrapped up in a tough-minded thriller about corruption on the force. But it fails miserably on both counts: the suspense unravels, the storytelling is clubfooted and long-winded, and any attempted investment of emotion in the characters is quickly bludgeoned out of the viewer by all the excess sturm und drang. If this botched movie were a real police investigation, the case would be thrown out of court.
Co-scripted by director O’Connor and Joe Carnahan, Pride And Glory introduces a large extended Irish-American family whose menfolk have been NYPD cops for generations. It takes about half an hour of screen time to sort out their family relationships, but here’s the shortcut version: patriarch Frank Tierney (Jon Voight) is retired from the force. Number One son Frank Jr., or Fran (Noah Emmerich), is a precinct captain whose wife, Abby (the lovely Jennifer Ehle), is battling cancer.
Frank’s daughter and Fran’s sister, Megan (Lake Bell) is married to Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell), a brash young sergeant in Fran’s precinct (and star of the precinct football team). And middle Tierney sibling Ray (Edward Norton) is something of a black sheep, having given up police work on the street for a reclusive job in the Missing Persons department. There are hints that he sold out his conscience in the line of duty in the recent past; since then, he’s become estranged from the wife he still loves, and lives in seclusion on a boat in the harbor.
The plot kicks in when four cops on Jimmy’s team are brutally murdered at a crime scene. An inter-departmental task force is set up to identify and capture the perps, and Ray reluctantly agrees to head up the investigation, bullied into the job by his old man, who’s determined to get Ray’s career back on the fast track. With his cool demeanor, attention to detail, and ability to question witnesses in Spanish, Ray soon uncovers evidence of an appalling level of crime and corruption within the force—from drug-dealing to execution. And every new discovery brings his investigation closer and closer to home.
Everything seems to be in place for a taut thriller in which Ray’s investigation drives him inexorably toward a showdown with his own conscience. But the filmmakers can’t be bothered to build suspense; 15 minutes into the movie, we’re shown who the bad guys are and how they operate. Instead of concentrating on Ray’s journey, piecing together ever more damning and horrific evidence that will throw his family into a crisis and challenge him to decide where his loyalties lie—force, family, or justice—the filmmakers opt to focus on violent scenes of the crooked cops at work on their beat. Men are beaten, bullied and tortured, women are slapped around, a baby is threatened with a hot iron. None of these scenes are essential to the already overlong plot; it’s brutality porn for its own sake.
The movie grinds on in this fashion, telling us way more than we need to know and rarely getting anywhere. (For extra grit, everybody’s favorite four-letter expletive is bandied about so constantly, in every possible grammatical construct—noun, verb, adjective, exclamation—it becomes a joke in itself.) The only brief moments of respite are offered in a couple of tender scenes between Emmerich and Ehle. Then, when it finally looks like we’re heading for a payoff on all those juicy family dynamics, when Ray’s choice has become almost involving, it’s all thrown away in the most laughably idiotic finale since There Will Be Blood. Squandered too are good performances from an excellent cast who deserved so much more.
*1/2 (out of four)
With Edward Norton, Colin Farrell, Jon Voight and Noah Emmerich. Written by Gavin O’Connor and Joe Carnahan. Directed by Gavin O’Connor. A New Line Cinema release. Rated R. 125 minutes.
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