When you know you're walking into a movie that's been sitting on the studio shelf for two years, like a dirty secret the studio owners have been keeping to themselves, and when you know that the film has been shuffled through various release dates over the year or so, the best you can probably hope for is that the movie in question is watchable. Pride and Glory is indeed very watchable, and actually has some good performances going for it. With a cast including Edward Norton, Colin Farrell and Noah Emmerich, that much is a given. It's almost a shame that the script itself is so workmanlike. You keep on waiting for the movie to break free from the restraints of its well worn cliches, and it never does.

Pride and Glory is a movie about family, brotherhood, crooked cops, loyalty, and all the expected material that comes with the genre. There's the good cop, Ray (Edward Norton), and his brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell), who is the bad cop. And no, I'm not spoiling anything. The film and even its ad campaign makes this abundantly clear, so it's not a who done it. Noah Emmerich plays Ray's brother, Francis, the one caught in the middle and questioning his own loyalties. To top it all off, their dad is a retired police chief played by Jon Voight, who only wants to see the family situation caused peacefully and swept under the rug, though that's obviously not an option. Just by hearing those character descriptions, you can probably plan the course of the plot out in your mind before you see the film, and you wouldn't be too far off. The movie adds to the drama, by exploring the family situations of each individual brother. Ray's brother, for example, has a wife who is dying of Cancer (Jennifer Ehle), and he is conflicted by being a decent man around his wife and trying to help her survive, and the dirty dealings he knows is going on in his own family and in his own police department.

The plot kicks off when Ray is convinced by his father to get back into crime investigating when four cops are killed in a shootout with some drug dealers. Something happened in Ray's past, and he's been working in Missing Persons before his father convinces him to get involved, since the men killed were connected to his brother. Ray begins to search for information, and eventually starts to realize that there's a lot of corruption underneath within the force. We learn early on that Jimmy and some members of his squad have been taking money from drug dealers to kill rival drug dealers. Jimmy sees it as part of the job, since he's only getting rid of lowlifes, but when Ray starts snooping around and information about his operation starts to leak out, it threatens to tear the closely knit family bonds apart. Everyone takes different sides, loyalties are called into question, and the movie settles into a comfortable rut that so many just like it have used before.

That's not to say there isn't anything to recommend in Pride and Glory. As mentioned, the performances are pretty much first rate, and almost make us forget that the movie is offering us nothing new. Norton and Farrell bring a lot of intensity to their respective characters, and Jon Voight (an actor who has been cashing one too many easy paychecks these days) gives one of his better performances as the father dealing both with what is happening with his family and with his alcoholism. Part of the reason I wanted the movie to throw off the shackles of its conventions is because these are good characters, and I liked what I saw of them outside of the formula. The movie's brief views into their family life are powerful on their own, but not nearly enough is done with them. We never truly get the reaction of Jimmy's wife to what he's been doing, and the subplot concerning Francis' dying wife comes across as a tease, since it's introduced and then never resolved. It's almost as if director and co-writer Gavin O'Connor (2004's Miracle) had a good idea, but never went all the way through with it.

Despite all this, Pride and Glory manages not to make too many wrong moves and mainly keeps the melodrama in check...Until the final moments, that is. And what a couple of final moments they are. The movie keeps on building and building until we throw our hands up in defeat, and just wait for the credits to come. You can almost picture the writers sitting at their word processor, desperately looking for a way to end all of this the right way. If this is the best they could do, they should have kept on looking. It takes the easy way out with outbursts of violence, contrived conveniences of the script, and a general feel of ham-fisted drama. The actors do what they can with the material they're given, but it doesn't make it feel like any less of a cop out. Here is a movie that should have ended with quiet reflection and maybe some honesty, and instead it gives us an overblown and overstuffed ending that explodes right there on the screen and never quite recovers.

Pride and Glory is nowhere near as good as it should have been, but it's not a complete lost cause. All it needed was a better ending, and some more attention paid to its intriguing subplots that are left hanging and underdeveloped. You almost wish you could be in the room when the script was being written, and convince them to go just a little bit further, veer off the expected path just a little bit more. The movie did not deserve to be hidden away from the public for so long, but it probably could have stood another rewrite or two before it went before the cameras.

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