Pride and Glory is a rather typical police story about corrupt police men, drugs, and family. It stars Edward Norton, Colin Farrell and Jon Voight and is directed by Gavin O’Connor.

Plot:
The Tierneys are a family of cops  – father Francis (Jon Voight), his two sons Ray (Edward Norton) and Fran (Noah Emmerich) and their brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell) all work in the police. After the gruesome murder of four colleagues during a raid, Ray takes over the case and finds corruption not only in the police force, but also in his family.

I love Edward Norton. I really really really do. He’s a great actor, he has good taste when it comes to movies [well, almost always], he’s intelligent, he’s good looking. He’s the kind of guy I would love to spend an evening with. So, I expected a lot from his performance. But this movie made me wonder… Is he in financial troubles? Should I start a fund so he’ll be able to keep his artistic integrity? Does he need help with anything?
[Colin Farrell, even though he makes me want to get naked and dirty, is not famous for his great movie choices. (With a few exceptions.) So, no grand expectations here.]

[SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS]

Before I start with the things I didn’t like, let’s talk about the things that were good: The cast is great. Not only the main guys I mentioned above, but also the supporting cast, with special honourable mention for Jennifer Ehle.

Also, the characters themselves were really good. Which might have more to do with the acting than with the writing, but they all had substance and background and were very tangible.

As for the rest… *sigh*

First of all, the story: So, the Jimmy (the brother-in-law) is corrupt, trying to get himself into the drug business with all means at his disposal, which are a lot, seeing that he’s a police man. So, he has his group of people and they threaten, blackmail, beat up and almost burn babies with hot irons. [That was a really bad scene.]

This revelation comes as no suprise and by the time we arrive there, you don’t really care anymore, since you know about 15 minutes in who the corrupt one of the guys is.

But okay, a story that doesn’t surprise and isn’t new can still be good. Unfortunately, this one isn’t. While I appreciate the morale questions it asked, the problem was that the answers were given with the question. You didn’t need to think, you got everything you might wonder about served pre-chewed by Ray Tierney.

Plus, it just all felt so inevitable. Right up to the ending, the characters didn’t seem to have any choices at all. I just don’t believe that to be true.

Oh, and the ending was just ridiculous, imo. Why would Ray, who did everything right, suddenly start to beat up Jimmy before arresting him? It just didn’t fit.
And then Jimmy gets beaten to death by the people he abused so long and Ray returns alone to Fran – what happens to the body? Did Ray just leave Jimmy there after he was forced to watch his death? Somehow, I can’t see that happening.

Well, as you might have gathered from my comments – the film is really violent. I personally don’t have a problem with that, but it might put other people off watching it.

My biggest problem, though, was the directing. There were too many handcamera walks, which left me nauseous. O’Connor is a fan of long shots, but instead of having a wide angle and keeping the camera steady in one place, he just kept moving the camera from face to face and back. Add to that the fact that Ray lived on a houseboat and you got one sea-sick kalafudra.

Also, the lighting sucked. More often than not there were weird reflections or dark corners and shadows or flickering lights where there shouldn’t be any flicker. That was pretty annoying.

As a minor sidenote: Some of the talking is done in Spanish and Pride and Glory is of the “subtitles are for wussies” school of film making. (I detect a trend.) Which means that they sometimes switch to English in Spanish conversations which is a little weird. [Btw, Edward Norton’s Spanish is really good.]

So, this could have been a good movie if you’d have removed Gavin O’Connor from the equation. Like it is, it’s pretty average.