Gavin O'Connor's new film, Pride and Glory, has a plan: it's mapped out all the things it wants to remind you of. It clearly wants to echo the moral ambiguity of The Wire, the multigenerational sweep of The Godfather, the close-knit web of loyalty and betrayal of The Departed. But since it's O'Connor at the helm instead of the talented folks who brought you those stories, it conjures them in tone only, never in quality, and leaves you asking: haven't I seen this movie before -- like, a hundred times?.
If O'Connor started out with a script that wasn't particularly going anywhere, and if he wasn't especially going to bring anything to the table as the director, he at least gave us some actors with juice to play his family of often-shady New York police officers. Edward Norton, who isn't the world's most consistent performer but is occasionally capable of greatness, plays Ray Tierney, a conflicted hard-ass who is divided between fidelity to his insular cop clan and a desire to do the right thing no matter what. This sort of agonized moralist is a specialty of Nortons, but here he just seems sort of bored. Jon Voight, on the other hand, seems to be having a ball as the family's drunken father figure, and even though the vast majority of his dialogue are windy cliches, he livens up the flick every moment he's on screen. No such luck with Colin Farrell, toothy at the best of times and absolutely ludicrous here: as bad-boy brother-in-law Jimmy Egan, he might as well be twirling a Snidley Whiplash mustache and tying his wife (named, no kidding, Megan Egan) to a railroad track.
Pride and Glory tries for the kind of intensity conjured by movies like Serpico, Donnie Brasco, and Goodfellas, which is probably why all its highfalutin talk about honor and loyalty and devotion sound so familiar. But it's not a comfortable familiarity; it's a boring one. The movie never really picks up, even in its most action-packed scenes, because it has an unwarranted confidence in the dramatic potential of its plot, and an unjustified trust in the ability of its lead actors to deliver it. Farrell's goofy performance aside, there's not that much about it to actively dislike; but there's certainly not much to like, either. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Big Mac: overstuffed, not very good for you, and you've already tried it so many times that you don't even really taste it anymore.
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