The world of Irish-American cops has been mined by Hollywood for decades, so it’s getting tough to find anything new or any new ways to say it about them. HBO’s The Wire said plenty about cops in general and Irish-American badgemen in particular, and said it in plenty of new ways. But Pride and Glory, with smashing direction and fine performances, says nothing we don’t already know, or think we know, from years of feasting on TV and movie cop dramas.

 

Pride and Glory is the Abel and Cain-in-law story of Ray Tierney (Edward Norton) and his sister’s husband Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell). Ray, Jimmy, Ray’s brother Francis Jr and their dad “Pop” Francis Sr (Jon Voight) are all cops; in fact, Pop is an ambitious senior policeman still counting on Ray to become the world’s greatest detective. But whereas Francis Jr climbs the ranks only to settle into command as if he were managing a furniture store, detective Ray is still traumatized by something no one wants to discuss—including Pop, who tells him, essentially, to walk it off. After four police are slain in an ambush, Pop begs and threatens his star son Ray to join in the hunt for the killer.

 

The problem, as we learn early in the movie and via its ads, is that brother-in-law Jimmy commands a crew of corrupt cops indirectly responsible for the ambush. For Ray to succeed, he must doom the career of his negligent brother Francis and ruin his sister’s life by sending her husband Jimmy to jail.

 

Pride and Glory entertains ably with its violence and chases, and sometimes achieves sublime moments, as when Pop drunkenly stumbles through his Christmas dinner elegy to his beleaguered family, when a corrupt cop confesses to Francis Jr the depth and stench of his crimes or when Francis Jr and his cancer-struck wife speak quietly of their life while facing her impending death. Such moments are this film’s greatest strengths, examining the twin cancers destroying the Tierney dynasty, and are enhanced by the best cop movie score—plenty of strings and delicate guitar work—since that of Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon. Jon Voight is excellent as the staggering patriarch, and Noah Emmerich is intriguing as grieving proto-widower and commander only beginning to perceive the fall-out of his neglect.

 

Pride and Glory should have extended such strengths to the film’s villains. Jimmy is compelling only for rubbernecking at his evil deeds. Despite the grandeur of the film’s title, the film offers little beyond the, “I risk my life every day for 65 grand a year?” to account for several cops’ fall from grace, and thus Farrell, while entertaining, is largely wasted. Norton has demonstrated time and again how well he can play wounded and sensitive, and he doesn’t get to do much more than that. But the film’s greatest waste is its refusal to engage—even to the shallowness of Farrell’s Jimmy—the assorted coloured criminals whose crimes set the plot in motion and are the steam rising from its shit. V