From today's Oregonian....
There's a specific moment in the overwrought crime drama "Pride and Glory" that made me laugh out loud for all the wrong reasons:
NYPD cop Jimmy (Colin Farrell) is in the hot seat, being interviewed about an officer-involved shooting during a videotaped deposition with Internal Affairs. This is one of the most formal, protocol-driven, legalistic, high-stakes settings a policeman can face. One wrong word ends careers, families, lives. The tape will be watched by NYPD top brass.
And Farrell, God bless his caterpillar eyebrows, is calmly dropping three f-bombs into every sentence of his testimony -- in a way no cop ever would in front of real-life IA detectives. He's saying something along the lines of, "And then he took out his [bleepin'] gun and discharged three [bleepin'] rounds into the [bleepin'] suspect and boy it was a tough [bleepin'] call, sonny boy. My heart goes out to the poor [bleeper]. [bleep]."
Those weren't Ferrell exact words. But they definitely capture the vibe of "Pride and Glory" by that point: Too many people in the production seem to have learned what they know about street life from the movies, so their idea of "authenticity" means shouting every line in an overcooked dialect of unintentionally funny Tourette's -- where f-bombs begin and end each sentence and possibly break up the syllables between words. (Favorite example from the film: "I want his ass here forth-[bleepin']-with.")
In other words, "Pride and Glory" is a movie full of actors improvising their idea of how cops in a Scorsese flick would talk. It's a special sort of cartoonishness, a hard-to-pin-down brand of emotionally grandstanding fakeness you sometimes see in movies trying way too hard to be "gritty."
Like "We Own the Night" before it, "Pride and Glory" is the most depressing sort of not-that-great movie -- because it really, really wants to be an epic drama and a serious actor showcase, but it just can't close the deal.
The script (co-written by f-bomb specialist Joe Carnahan) feasts on the agonizing moral choices of two generations of New York's Finest. Four officers in the 31st Precinct are gunned down in a drug slum. The investigation draws in a clan of cops including Edward Norton, Jon Voight, Noah Emmerich and Mr. Farrell. Some of these men are complicit. At least one of these men is so nasty and corrupt, he threatens to scald a drug dealer's baby with a laundry iron.
Director Gavin O'Connor ("Miracle") does a decent job with the quiet moments: Norton's intimate witness interviews, family dinners, news choppers drifting quietly over a police funeral. Jon Voight gives maybe the greatest improvised teary-eyed drunk-grandpa dinner-table speech in movie history.
But whenever O'Connor tackles any sort of confrontation that requires peak emotion, the hilariously relentless f-bombs start flying and the actors pull out the choppers and start gnashing away at various bits of scenery, and in the quest for "grittiness," "plausibility" gets lost. This is especially true of poor Colin Farrell, who breaks his streak of strong performances with this motormouthed, two-fisted cuss-a-thon.
And don't even get me started about the climactic fistfight at the Irish pub. It's just ridiculous.
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C-minus; 125 minutes; rated R for strong violence, pervasive language and brief drug content.
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