PRIDE AND GLORY

Pride and Glory is both extremely well-acted, and extremely typical.

Haven't we all seen this good cop/bad copy story before? Two brothers on opposite sides of the law... No, wait, in this case there are two brothers and a brother-in-law (but in the world of cops, brother-in-law is family, aka "You're like a brother to me!!!"). But the performances of Ed Norton, Noah Emmerich, and Colin Farrell up the ante just enough to make Pride and Glory a satisfying cop drama.

The Tierney brothers, Ray (Norton) and Francis, Jr. (Emmerich), are second generation cops. Dad (John Voight) is a blowhard old-school cop who still holds the pride and glory of being one of the men in blue very close to his heart. If it means protecting his own—and that includes the men in his precinct—so be it. There has always been a little bit of corruption in the force. But that was then, and nowadays corruption comes in the form of Jimmy (Farrell) who is married into the family and is a great father and protective husband. But, on the job, Jimmy is simply a psychopath. Pride and Glory takes its time showing us Jimmy's bad side, but when we do see it, it is really hard to watch (let's just say that Jimmy, the family man, takes no pause in violently threatening another man's women and children to make him talk).

The tension of the film swirls around a fiasco where four cops under Francis' command are killed—basically slaughtered in a drug raid. Was it a set up? An inside job? Was it a horrible accident, or a cop out (so to speak)? The more Ray investigates his brother and brother-in-law's precinct, the more he finds out that he doesn't want to know. He himself has a dark past (and an ugly facial scar and estranged wife to prove it), but he knows that the corruption has got to stop. Four cops are dead, and it all has gone too far.

Like I said, Pride and Glory is better than it should be—a rather run-of-the-mill story standing on the shoulders of an extremely strong cast. Voight, who in his later years has forgotten how NOT to chew a scene, is even tolerable. The movie belongs entirely (as these movies often do) to the men: their guns, their tears, their threats, and their fists. However, take note of fabulous Jennifer Ehle, as Francis' wife who is dying of cancer, who completely shred the two scenes she is in. Now that is how to steal a scene.

Fans of cop movies will find a lot to like in Pride and Glory. Just suck in your breath, as the violence in the film quite often reaches the tipping point of unwatchable.

  DVD NOTES  

The two-disc special edition of Pride and Glory includes a digital copy of the film, and an extensive making-of documentary (clocking in at over an hour long!) called "Source of Pride: The Making of Pride and Glory".