DVD Review: “Pride and Glory”
Rating: 33
So familiar you can smell the plot points five minutes before they arrive, “Pride and Glory” trades in the same brawling, cop-and-criminal family drama that filled James Gray’s “We Own the Night” and Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace.” At 125 minutes, it is one long slog to an inevitable end as brother clashes with brother clashes with brother-in-law, all filmed in a sickly blue tint that makes “Minority Report” look positively warm by comparison.
When four undercover officers are killed, Police Chief Francis Tierney Sr. (Jon Voight, dishing out the ham) assigns his son, former hotshot detective Ray (Edward Norton) to the case. The Tierney clan is deeply wrapped in the killings, since the officers reported to Francis Tierney Jr. (Noah Emmerich) and a chief suspect is Ray’s brother-in-law, Jimmy Eagan (Colin Farrell), a cop moonlighting as a hitman and drug dealer.
“Pride and Glory” only entertains in fits and spurts: Voight has a nice moment of light drunkenness during a Christmas dinner, wobbling as he extols the virtues of his miserable clan. But in modern crime dramas, the juxtaposition of Christmas songs and melodramatic cheer with buckets of blood has been overworked as much as Irish cop clans and battling brothers. Writer-director Gavin O’Connor and co-writer Joe Carnahan (“Smokin’ Aces”) pump enough profanity into “Pride and Glory” to fill two Martin Scorsese mob hits, but this macho mess never earns its grit and winds up feeling like a cold case.
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