'Pride and Glory' ★★

[BABY1]

TweetYou keep the rage, you cut the rest of it loose." So says Jon Voight's Manhattan police chief to his NYPD officer son, played by Noah Emmerich, in "Pride and Glory." The line is very pulpy, no question, but Voight has a way of tossing it off that A) doesn't oversell it, and B) suggests his character hasn't cut the rest of it loose at all. The grime and loss and dead bodies have started to eat away at his morality.

"Pride and Glory" is full of interesting little grace notes, and the cast is excellent, yet it grows more and more frustrating. It has everything going for it except a story that doesn't send the audience out miles ahead of the plot developments.

To be clear: Director and co-writer Gavin O'Connor, who wrote the script with Joe Carnahan, has no interest in treating his dirty-cops scenario, involving conflicted family loyalties and lots of drug money, as a mystery. Straight off it's plain who's clean, who's on the take (or worse) and who's in the middle. Edward Norton is the clean one, Detective Ray Tierney, a scandal-tainted officer now voluntarily consigned to Missing Persons. After a bloody ambush leaves four officers dead, Voight's character arm-twists Ray, who is his son, into heading up the task force investigating the murders.

It's a family affair all around: The dead men served under Ray's officer brother, played by Emmerich. The Tierneys' brother-in-law, Jimmy, played by Colin Farrell, is just shifty and jumpy and rageful enough to indicate a conspiracy. O'Connor's main concern is to keep the dirty cops one step ahead of the clean ones while closing in on the drug lord responsible for the carnage. Most every scene is thuddingly on-point, and despite some pretty extreme violence—at one point Farrell's borderline sociopath threatens the infant child of a drug dealer with a hot iron—you wait for Norton to get wise to the corruption sloshing all around him.



What works in "Pride and Glory"? The little things help, such as the way Voight hits his character's degree of drunkenness at a family get-together just so, or the tenderness Emmerich brings to his scenes with his dying wife, played by the superb Jennifer Ehle. Norton's solid, too, but he cannot make much of his largely functionary character's reckoning. The plot is too familiar, too reliant on coincidence and expediency. Put it on the maybe-on-cable list along with last year's "We Own the Night." Remember that one?

[BABY1]

TweetI would still like to see it even though this critic only gives it 2 stars.i I think Ed Norton is great, especially liked him in "American History X".

[bigbadexcursion]

Tweet25th Hour was his best movie IMO