Saturday, October 25, 2008

Pride and Glory

by Michael

How seventies do you like your cop films? Gavin O’Connor’s Pride and Glory could have been an unabashed throwback to the glory days of The French Connection, The Seven Ups, Serpico, days when barroom fisticuffs triumphed over critical thinking. Sure, there are those fisticuffs, but trapped in a film that plays like a bad cover version.  

In place of the fluid documentary style of William Friedkin, we have the kind of clunky handheld photography one would normally associate with a first-time director. Instead of Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider hunched on street corners with cold pizza and coffee, we get the normally-reliable Edward Norton, sleepwalking in the same manner he did in Brett Ratner’s  Red Dragon. We get Jon Voight doing a watered-down Martin Sheen from The Departed, as Norton’s proud cop father. And then there’s Colin Farrell, after his strong turn in In Bruges, as a corrupt cop, given little to do other than alternately weep and threaten others, caught in the script’s vain attempt at moral ambiguity. 

And it is the script that is the chief offender, offering up a tired tale of a damaged cop Ray Tierney(Norton) forced to investigate the murder of four officers, an event directly connected to his hotheaded brother-in-law Jimmy(Colin Farrell), whose corrupt nature is revealed in the first twenty minutes. Points for guessing who ends up in the aforementioned bar brawl. The only shocker in this sub-Serpico slog is that it was co-written by Narc director Joe Carnahan. Because the script lacks characters as memorable as those portrayed by Ray Liotta and Jason Patric, we are left with a film awash in the blue tint of Narc, but without the energy, the direction, or the soul. Just more violence, cops, family, and booze.