Pride and Glory
Review by Brandon Fibbs | posted 10/24/2008
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Pride and Glory has had a rocky road getting to the screen. Set to begin production in early 2002, the film was abandoned after the 9/11 attacks on New York City, when it was deemed that people wanted to celebrate the heroics of the city's police force, rather than tarnish their reputation with a tale of corruption and scandal. Once it was finally made, Pride and Glory spent the better part of two years sitting on the shelf, ping-ponging between release dates. Now that it's finally seeing the light of day, is Pride and Glory worth the wait? Yes, but barely.
The always dependable Edward Norton plays Ray Tierney, a missing persons investigator whose Chief of Detectives father, Francis Tierney, Sr. (Jon Voight) pulls him from his duties to look into the brutal slaying of four cops on a drug bust gone wrong. Ray shares some of the same DNA of L.A. Confidential's crusading do-gooder Ed Exley, minus the loathsome self-righteousness. He's an honorable cop in a soul-numbing profession. Ray doesn't want the assignment. His life has been falling apart lately and he has the scars, both physically and emotionally, to prove it. He'd much rather spend his days sequestered in an office and his nights holed up in his leaky houseboat. But his father insists, impatient for him to get back into the field after a traumatic altercation, despite what is an obvious conflict of interest.
Colin Farrell as Jimmy Egan, Edward Norton as Ray Tierney
The dead cops were all under the command of Ray's brother, Francis Tierney Jr. (Noah Emmerich), whose wife (Jennifer Ehle) is dying of cancer. Each of them worked side by side with Ray and Francis' hot-headed brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell). Ray finds himself in a claustrophobic position when his investigation begins to turn up a web of police corruption directly implicating his family, especially ringleader Jimmy. It seems Jimmy and his cop cohorts have been using their position to fleece the neighborhood and skim profits from local drug dealers.
When Ray shares his suspicions with his father, who initially told him to let nothing stand in the way of getting to the truth, Ray is told to back off and let things lie. Ray is faced with an impossible decision—does he do the right thing despite the fact that it will tear his family into tatters, or does he look the other way in the interest of domestic tranquility? If the ending of Pride and Glory is contrived, it is, at least, justice writ large on a Shakespearian scale.
Pride and Glory is a solid if unimaginative addition to a cop genre becoming increasingly devoid of originality. Purveyors of the genre will recognize bits and pieces of the recent masterpiece The Departed, the atrocious Street Kings, and the middling We Own the Night, also a film about conflicted brothers in blue. Pride and Glory taps well-worn themes: law enforcement spanning generations of a single family, cultural pride, brother pitted against brother, the clash of family and career loyalties, racial disintegration, etc.
Noah Emmerich as Francis Tierney Jr., Jon Voight as Frances Tierney Sr.
The satisfactory police melodrama is careful to never paint outside the lines or even consider reinventing the wheel, but it also crams in plenty of gritty action and harrowing, gore-splattered violence. Good cops meet bad cops on mean streets makes for an engrossing, if familiar, yarn. Pride and Glory didn't need to be made—if for no other reason than it has already appeared in various incarnations—but thankfully it takes its formulaic building blocks and uses them to construct something ever so slightly above the standard genre fare.
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