Friday 27 March 2015

"When we were kids, all we ever talked about was being cops."


Year: 2008
Director: Gavin O'Connor
Writers: Joe Carnahan & Gavin O'Connor (Screenplay), Gavin O'Connor, Greg O'Connor & Robert Hopes (Story)

A family's moral codes are tested when Ray Tierney investigates a case that reveals an incendiary police corruption scandal involving his own brother-in-law. For Ray, the truth is revelatory, a Pandora's Box that threatens to upend not only the Tierney legacy but the entire NYPD.
- New Line Cinema

My friend from Boston warned me that Pride And Glory was bad. There are lots of people who would disagree with her, but I am not one of those people.

Someone on iMDB wrote how unusual Pride And Glory was for a cop movie. I don't know about unusual, but there were many details that were so typical for a crime thriller that they made me want to vomit. There were so many useless little things that were typical and clichéd and everything. The story? Well, I don't think it would be extremely unusual or original, I mean most movies of this kind use the same kind of pattern. Maybe some things were original and new, but they didn't really hit me that much. Mostly Pride And Glory felt like just a typical cop movie with the classical arrangement - good cops and bad cops, etcetera.

The plot also felt unclear and scrappy, at least in the beginning. You don't know anything, you just get thrown in the mix, and you need to figure out stuff yourself. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. But there were moments where I had to wonder who was on whose side and what were they doing and why. I don't know, there also could've been some kind of mistake in the subtitles, or I understood one line wrong, because that kind of made the whole thing feel weird compared to the rest of the plot. I don't really know.

If there was anything true to this movie, well, it showed what kind of pricks cops can be to people of colour, in this case Hispanic Latinos. Though usually cops don't even have to be criminals to be pricks, usually it's just because white cops can be racist, so I don't think Pride And Glory was trying to make some kind of political statement here. And oh, some of the criminals, usually Latinos, said the N-word a lot. It also made no sense, because usually the people around weren't actually black, or maybe I missed something. I don't know what kind of  point they were trying to make with using that word, it was just weird and of course kind of obnoxious.

How hard is it to edit a movie? I mean there was a lot useless stuff there that could've been cut without losing much. They had nothing to do with plot, some of them were just there to give character(s) some kind of  background story, I mean showing the viewer that they had life before this. Well it's something a viewer probably assumes even though if it wouldn't been said. This movie was about two hours, and they could've easily made it like one hour, 45 minutes. 

In short, Pride and Glory was sort of  boring. And now that I finished it, what do I have? Nothing. I mean the movie has its exciting parts, but they didn't really have that effect the scenes of a well made thriller movie usually give you. I don't really feel like much now that it's over. It doesn't really stand out, it just is another movie among others. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't worth of seeing.

☆☆☆☆
4 / 10

Also now I'm 86 % through my challenge.

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