Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

Gripping ‘Glory’

The cop drama is one of the most well-worn genres in all of film. So many movies about the Boys in Blue have come and gone that concocting truly novel story lines is almost futile.

“Pride and Glory” plows no new ground storywise. Its tale of corruption and family tragedy among New York City cops is all too familiar. Even so, its focus on character, infused by the talents of a great cast, pushes it into the win column.

Director Gavin O’Connor, working from a script that he co-wrote with Joe Carnahan, pits Edward Norton against Colin Farrell in a steel-cage death match. The electricity between these two fine actors fairly arcs off the screen, largely because they have reverse polarity — Norton is the quiet storm, Farrell the unbridled hurricane.

Norton is Detective Ray Tierney, who has been off the streets in self-imposed professional exile for two years after compromising himself in a wrongful death case.

Then his father, Chief of Manhattan Detectives Francis Tierney Sr. (Jon Voight), asks him to serve on a task force investigating what looks like a drug bust gone way bad, in which four cops under the command of Ray’s older brother, Inspector Francis Tierney Jr. (Noah Emmerich), were massacred.

Ray reluctantly mans up but soon becomes torn when the investigation starts to point toward his own brother-in-law, Jimmy Egan (Farrell), the kind of hotheaded cop to whom the ends always justify the means.

Norton is terrific as a man in a moral quandary, torn between loyalty to his family and to his sworn oath to uphold and protect. Farrell is equally awesome as a man who has just about lost all sight of the thin line between good and evil.

“Breathe a word of this and I’ll come back and slit your throat, [bleep] your wife and kill your kid,” Egan rages to one hapless, low-level drug dealer.

The film is no picnic; in both the washed-out blues and grays of its cinematography and the rawness of its performances, it is relentlessly dark and brutal right up to its closing credits.

But there’s something to be said for movies that show the courage of their convictions rather than blowing patently phony late-inning sunshine. And while the story may be on the predictable side, Norton and Farrell pump enough fire into “Pride and Glory” to make it a consistently engrossing ride.

Rated R for graphic violence, language and drug references.

Random plug: ‘Devil’-ish drama

I recently caught up with a 2007 film that I didn’t get to see before it exited the octoplex. “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke in electric performances as brothers who decide to solve their many personal problems by robbing the strip mall jewelry store owned by their cold, domineering father (Albert Finney). The boys get a fat payoff, insurance covers Dad’s losses and everybody’s happy.

It all goes spectacularly awry, of course, and legendary director Sidney Lumet exquisitely tightens the noose on these idiot sibs as they flail helplessly en route to a horrific climax that is a landmark in the annals of family dysfunction flicks.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth renting. Four stars, easily.

Rated R — for good reason. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.