Despite a gritty adherence to police culture that comes from director Gavin O'Connor's real-life father and especially several lived-in performances, the dirty-cop drama "Pride and Glory" overshoots the mark by spinning its implausible, hyperviolent tale around too tight a family circle. After four NYPD cops are killed in a drug bust in Washington Heights, Officer Ray Tierney (Edward Norton) is assigned by his police chief father (Jon Voight) to the internal affairs force investigating the slaughter. But Ray has a progressively messy situation on his hands: The slain officers served under his older brother (Noah Emmerich), a precinct head, and alongside his flash-tempered brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell).
As he digs deeper, Ray finds Jimmy is the center of a crew of bad apples who intimidate, rob and bully the neighborhood, and who are linked to a powerful drug dealer. Ray, who's been out of duty since he himself was caught under fire some years earlier, wants to do the right thing, but must first face down his dad's demands and his family's reputation.
O'Connor and his co-writer brother, Gregory O'Connor, clearly know the blue wall they write about. However, boiling their story down to a Shakespearean clump of clan loyalty doesn't serve the movie's grander ambitions. (And giving Emmerich's character a wife nobly suffering from cancer is simply piling on the tragedy.)
Though a certain amount of gruffness is expected in a movie like this, there are a few too many scenes of guys getting grabbed by the collar and pushed against a wall until they talk, and one moment with a newborn baby being threatened is simply hard to watch.
Norton again rises above his deep-thinking persona and wiry physical presence, as he did in "American History X," "Fight Club" and "25th Hour," to find a noirish heaviness (this movie was shot prior to summer's "The Incredible Hulk," which unfortunately reduced him to a cartoon's shadow).
And while Farrell's sneering black sheep and Voight's lion in winter are cliches for both this genre and the actors, Emmerich ("Little Children," "Miracle") plays his precinct chief's tortured moral score-keeping close to the vest. "Pride and Glory" could have used more of his kind of restraint.
