Pride and Glory is a teeth-gritting crime drama set against a snow-covered New York City. It very openly trades on the “morally dubious blue collar cop” archetypes popularized by recent television shows like The Shield and The Wire, but rarely achieves the intensity of the former, and never the intelligence of the latter. A story about a family of multi-generational policemen from the ever-more-corrupt NYPD, Pride and Glory presents its ethical quandaries without much concern for their effect on the story or the characters, leaving us with little more than an overlong family drama cum cop movie with clumsy dialogue and a habit of resorting to genre clichés in order to keep the plot limping along.
Our hero is Ray Tierney (Edward Norton), a scar-faced inspector with a not-so-mysterious past, who reluctantly heads up a squad investigating the slaying of four policemen in a ghetto apartment block. It turns out (not a spoiler, this is revealed in the trailer) that Ray's own brother-in-law, Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell), is the ringleader of a group of corrupt cops. Ray uncovers some proof that Jimmy isn't shooting straight very early, but decides to sit on it at the request of his father, and the film is at its best when Ray is trying to pursue the investigation properly while also trying to keep his family from unravelling. This doesn't last long, though. While running down a lead at a derelict apartment complex, Ray hears shots fired, heroically charges in with no backup, and discovers the extent of Jimmy's corruption. This is where a merely average film takes a sharp turn toward badness.
While the violence in Pride and Glory is sparse, when it does occur, it's captured viscerally by Declan Quinn's deft camerawork. Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems with the film is that this violence never seems to be totally justified by the action. Early on, we see the outer limit of Jimmy's brutal desperation when he punches a woman in the face, takes her infant child from her and hangs a hot iron over it in order to illicit some information from the child’s father. Perhaps the horror of this scene would have played well in a different context, but very little tension had been built up in Jimmy's subplot before this — certainly not enough for him to be threatening infanticide. The best explanation for these baffling absences of motivation comes from the grating, alpha-male performances director Gavin O'Connor seems to have demanded from all of his actors. Chest-puffing in every scene doesn't leave much room for nuance, and everything after Ray's hilariously unprecedented charge into the housing project halfway through the film is driven by precious little else than the dick-waving competition all the characters are inexplicably engaged in.
A film depicting policemen as machismo-fuelled jocks who are eventually destroyed by their own simplistic moralizing would be bold and interesting. However, beyond a clever opening sequence where we actually see the cops behaving like chest-bumping idiots on a football field, O'Connor and co-writer Joe Caranahan appear to be buying into the cult of testosterone as much as their characters. Only Farrell plays it with any delicacy, providing his sociopath with a strange gentleness to go along with his working-class drawl and bullet-tooth dialogue. Too bad O'Connor didn't share his restraint.
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