Pride and Glory
Director: Gavin O’Connor
Starring: Edward Norton, Colin Farrell, Jon Voight, Noah Emmerich, Jennifer Ehle, John Ortiz, Lake Bell, Shea Whigham
Verdict: Hmm...
Director Gavin O’Connor should take no pride or glory for this stereotype cop drama. The cast is impressive — Colin Farrell, Jon Voight, Edward Norton — but the dull, drab story has nothing else to offer other than bloody corpses, filthy talk and some mindless action. Didn’t James Gray showcase all that in We Own the Night? On second thoughts, We Own the Night was a shade better.
Most of Pride and Glory is shot in blue light, which adds to its dullness and its clichéd dialogues are just mindless ramblings. The film takes off with four New York City cops being killed in a drug bust that sends the entire police department on alert. Chief of NYPD Manhattan Detectives Francis Tierney, Sr (Jon Voight) asks his son, Detective Ray Tierney (Edward Norton) to lead the investigation. A reluctant Ray takes over the case knowing that the cops who were killed had served under his brother, Francis Tierney, Jr (Noah Emmerich), and alongside his brother-in-law, Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell). As Ray investigates further, he discovers that someone from his team may have tipped off the drug dealers. And it turns out that Jimmy is the prime suspect here. Jimmy is mixed up in some dirty illegal business and right under Frannie’s nose he assembles thugs who work with the Big Apple’s drug dealers. Jimmy’s wife Megan (Lake Bell) isn’t aware of her husband’s involvement in the scandal that begins to drive a wedge between her brothers and her husband.
In this brotherly triangle of good versus bad, the focus is entirely on men; the women are pushed to the periphery. However, Abby Tierney (Jennifer Ehle), Francis’s terminally ill wife and mother of their young children, who knows the difference between right and wrong, draws our sympathy to a certain extent. The one that elicits disgust is when Jimmy tries to brand an infant’s face with a hot iron. Colin Farrell isn’t impressive, overdoing his menace and charm. Any takers for this repititive cop drama?