If you are part of a family tree of police officers with impeccable principles, and discovered that one of your own kin has been corrupted, what action should and would you take? This is the dilemma that confronts Ray Tierney (Edward Norton) in Pride and Glory.
Four New York Police Department detectives are knocked off in an ambush. Francis Tierney Senior (Jon Voight), retired chief of Manhattan Detectives, wants his son, Ray, to head the investigation. The dead cops had served under Ray’s elder brother, Francis Tierney Junior (Noah Emmerich) and brother-in-law, Jimmy (Colin Farrell). It soon becomes clear that almost the entire police department is on the payroll of a drug mafia.
Before burning their cash on the production floor, the studio ought to have invested in a good script doctor. For want of better imagination on the part of the writers, you get to watch cops plundering a store; setting fire to a car; killing ruthlessly; and entering someone’s house while the women are around, and threatening to burn an infant’s face with a hot, electric iron if the father does not squeal. That kind of incredibly crappy images.
Integrity writ on his forehead, Norton is the sad-faced good boy caught up in a dirty world. He places Christmas gifts at his wife’s doorstep. And is about to leave when she sees him. Their divorce papers are due in a month. They talk. They are very much still in love. You can see they are meant for each other. He doesn’t want the divorce. She doesn’t either. But she says that that’s what’s good for her. Given that the reason for their ‘fight’ is plain petty, why is the divorce good for her?
Farrell is full of remorse. The guilt shows both on his face and in his violent outbursts while trying to justify his actions. Emmerich is stoic and secretive, and gets his soul stained in the bargain. Voight is the sweet-firm patriarch who lives by his principles. But he also believes that “we must protect our own” even when they err terribly. For, loyalty and family mean everything to him.
Gavin O’Connor’s crime drama, written ironically in consultation with a police officer, is another NYPD story that sees law enforcers who “sold their shields off to the highest bidder” caught up in a murky world where the “sense of right and wrong” is all mixed up in a bloody mess.
