Carnahan and O'Connor: why shouldn't they be Irish?

The ideals in the title are exactly what the NYPD cops in this new film have lost touch with: here is an Irish-American police family with a father, two sons, and an in-law on the force who are turn apart by violence and scandal. There's not much to quarrel with in the acting, from the headliners, Colin Farrell, Edward Norton, Jon Voight and Noah Emmerich, on down the line, who all turn in good performances. What Pride and Glory has to struggle with is its lack of originality. It's also missing the grandeur of James Gray's similarly familiar but superior police drama of last year, We Own the Night. And Gray added interest by working his own Brighton Beach Russian background into his police dynasty and using Russian mafia baddies for the spice. No Officer Clancys there. But here O'Connor, Irish of course and the son of a policeman, collaborated with Irish-American Joe Carnahan, who wrote and directed the admirably gritty 2002 cop movie Narc. Were they wrong to stick to the convention of Irish cops?

In an October 26, 2008 NYTimes article, "Begorrah! Irish Cops, Yet Again," Dan Berry points out half the NYPD is "black, Hispanic, or Asian" now, and of the nine bureau chiefs, only two are Irish-American. In this movie, some of the cops are Hispanic or black, just not the main ones. The non-cop bad guys are pretty much all Hispanic, and one of the Irish-American cops must use a knowledge of Spanish to get his witnesses to loosen up. Barry suggests that "if a future New York police drama requires that two Irish cops brawl in the bar Irish Eyes in Washington Heights in 2008, perhaps the jukebox can play some merengue instead of a reel." Actually maybe it might play rap, who knows? Anyway, Barry is right in pointing out the many clichés, or familiar tropes, in Pride and Glory. And it needs to be just a bit better than it is to survive or transcend them.

As in Carnahan's Narc, the action begins fast, this time with a big end-of-season police football game that looks professional except that the players are a little old. When it's over, they learn four cops have been killed in a shootout. Something fishy was going on and in an intense men's room tête-à-tête Francis Tierney, Sr. (Voight) prevails on his younger son Ray (Norton) to forsake the bureau of statistics and get involved in an investigation. The slain cops all worked under older brother Frank Jr. (Emmerich), so the fishiness may taint him, and also his son-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell). The "brawl in the bar Irish Eyes" that Barry seems to find particularly clichéd and annoying is between Jimmy and Ray.

Some writers have objected that Norton is atypically uninteresting; that Voight is bombastic, and that O'Farrell is twitchy. I didn't think so. I even thought Voight did a superb job of feigning drunkenness at a family Christmas meal, and O'Farrell was much twitchier for Woody Allen. Norton has a coldness about him that suits very well the character with the firmest moral rudder guiding him. It's true, Ray's disintegrated marriage is another cop story cliché. But isn't urban police force work hard on marriages in real life?

What is disappointing about this movie isn't the familiar tropes of conflicted cops torn between honesty and family loyalty, or the presence of Irish-Americans in the foreground. Maybe this stuff is "pre-eighties" as Barry suggests, but so what? Old tunes can always be played a new way. The trouble is that there is plenty of violence, but not enough mystery or suspense or compelling enough relationships. There are also climactic moments that are confusing or blurred. I'm not quite sure why Jimmy and Ray chose to lay down their pistols and duke it out in that Irish bar. Their actual fight itself is largely and disappointingly blurry, with occasional bloody closeups. And meanwhile something very violent and crazy was happening outside a convenience store whose centrality to the plot also eluded me. Then, in the end, when the bad guys have been cleared aside and the remaining family members are united and in their blue uniforms, the filmmakers chose to omit dialogue, so satisfying final flourishes were missing. But of course we know the words to the tune, and the moral issues have been resolved.

Some details are manipulative or cheesy. Much has been made--understandably--of a threat to disfigure a baby with a hot clothing iron. But then the malefactor, after getting the info from the dad being blackmailed this way, mutters "beautiful baby" to the mother as he hands it back to her, thereby making it seem he never would have done the deed. Emmerich's wife with cancer (Jennifer Ehle) is exploited for sympathy in the movie's most manipulative moments. Carnahan has written in a couple of good crazed Hispanics scenes, but not as good ones as he did in Narc. But then, Narc was his baby. This was an ill-starred effort delayed nine years, and there may have been too many cooks spoiling the broth. Nonetheless it's still a slightly above-average example of the somewhat tired genre.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.