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PAGE 16, NOVEMBER 3, 2008, THE ISLANDER
&
“Goin* to
the Show...”
with...
Roland
Willis
PRIDE AND GLORY—
Starring: Edward Norton, Colin Farrell,
Jon Voight, & Noah Emmerich
Directed by Gavin O'Connor
Screenplay by Joe Carnahan & Gavin O'Connor
Story by Gavin O'Connor, Greg O'Connor & Robert Hopes
Running Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Rated R - Violence and profanity
The box office receipts for High
School Musical 3 ($42M) have greatly
exceeded those ($6M) from Pride and
Glory.
This is really not surprising because
in these gloomy economic times, and
at the end of an excruciating presi
dential race, we all need to be cheered
up. The exuberant musical does this
while the dreary Pride and Glory, the
tale of police corruption, does not.
The movie was set to go into pro
duction in 2002 but after 9/11 and the
heroism of the New York City Police
Department (NYPD), the timing was
bad for a fictional tale of corruption in
this same police force, and production
was delayed.
The father of the writers, Gavin
and Greg O’Connor, was a police
officer and they had access to, and
knowledge of, the police world. The
other writer, Robert Hopes, was him
self a police officer.
Together their challenge was to
come up with something new in a
genre which has been billy-clubbed to
death; they don’t succeed.
Pride and Glory starts with the
voice of the dispatcher: we’ve got
four cops down... two dead and two
likely.
Police chief Francis Tierney Sr.
(Jon Voight) wants the best men on
the task force to track down the kill
ers. The best man is his streetwise
son Ray (Edward Norton) who after
a previous, unhappy experience in
Homicide, is now in Missing Persons
and has to be talked into returning
by his Dad.
The victims were in Jimmy Egan’s’
squad and he should have known
what was coming down.
Ray’s investigation is complicated
because Jimmy Egan is married to
Ray’s sister.
In addition, Jimmy’s squad is
under police Captain Francis Tierney
Jr. (Noah Emmerich), Ray’s brother,
and he also should have known what
his guys were doing.
The investigation quickly becomes
a family problem and Ray must
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decide whether to track down the bad
cops and sacrifice his Irish family’s
reputation or to conceal the facts and
protect his family.
His options are limited by Ray who
readily admits, “I was a good man
once. We sold our shields off to the
highest bidder!”
The problem with this movie is
that we have seen all the parts before
and, consequently, the plot is bor
ingly predictable.
Also, whether it is the acting, the
screenplay or the direction, it is dif
ficult to empathize with these char
acters and the movie fails in the end
because you just don’t care about
them.
Of course, there have been so many
great, ‘bad cop’ movies that it is very
difficult to stand-out in this genre.
The classic film involving a corrupt
Irish cop in NYC is The Godfather.
In this Sterling Hayden plays Capt.
McCluskey, an ill-tempered cop with
a wicked right cross, who is on the
payroll of the evil drug dealer Sol-
lozzo (A1 Lettieri).
A1 Pacino quickly followed his role
as Michael Corleone in The Godfather
to play Serpico, apparently the only
straight cop in New York, and some
one distrusted by the entire police
force.
A surprisingly good movie of this
ilk was Cop Land in which Sylvester
Stallone is a slow but straight cop in
a small town across the river in New
Jersey where the bad cops (Harvey
Keitel, Ray Liotta and Robert De
Niro) from the City hang out for
R&R.
Then there was Witness in which
Harrison Ford seeks shelter in an
Amish community when he is pur
sued by crooked cops from Philadel
phia.
This problem apparently extends
beyond New York City.
Moving to L.A., James Cromwell
extended the crooked cop character
to the remorseless evil side with his
portrayal of Capt. Dudley Smith in
L.A. Confidential.
Denzel Washington was also pretty
scary as Alonzo in Training Day. How
would you like to get into a cruiser
with that character?
More recently there was the great
movie The Departed. If you are look
ing for crooked Irish cops, and the
crooks who sponsor them, what bet
ter place than Boston? The combina
tion of Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon,
Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Walh-
berg is pretty unbeatable.
More recently, Robert De Niro and
A1 Pacino paired up in Righteous Kill,
a cross-over between the crooked cop
and the vengeance genres. This failed
for the same reason as Pride and
Glory, a predictable plot.
The very best corrupt public offi
cial ever was Capt. Renault (Claude
Rains) in Casablanca. He gave us the
memorable line when asked by Rick
(Humphrey Bogart), as he was receiv
ing his roulette winnings, why he
was closing Rick’s Club, “I’m shocked,
shocked to find that gambling is going
on in here!”
The New York Times paraphrased
this line recently by amusingly pre
tending that Henry Paulson said,
“I’m shocked, shocked to find that
gambling is going on in the banking
industry!”
After all this ranting, let’s cut to
the chase. Avoid this one.
My rating is D. □
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