Pride and Glory

Let's get one thing straight: Pride and Glory is a Serious movie. It's easy to tell, because there aren't any jokes and because Edward Norton (The Incredible Hulk, Death to Smoochy) is in it and he is a Serious actor.

Norton stars as Ray Tierney, a Good Cop^TM from a family of less than good cops. Jon Voight is the family patriarch and police chief; Colin Farrell plays the brother; and some other guy rounds out the family as the other male member of the family. The movie is far too Serious to waste time with females. This is a movie about the important issues: Honor, Brotherhood, Family, Camaraderie, Loyalty, Masculinity, The NYPD.

The plot really kicks into high gear when a number of Ray's boys get killed and he's assigned to find the killer(s). SPOILER ALERT: The trail leads to Colin Farrell's boys, and ultimately to Farrell, thus setting up the central moral question of the film. It's one everybody has dealt with at some time: When your cop brother is actually a cop killer, do you turn him in even when it means ruining your entire cop family's career?

Naturally, being played by Voight, Papa Tierney is on hand to be morally ambiguous and try to dissuade Ray from Doing the Right Thing in favor of Thinking About His Family. And the other male family member almost has to die to remind the viewer that in Serious things like this the innocent are always the ones who suffer the most.

Of course, the viewer, suffering through this painful film, is already keenly aware of that fact.