Reviewer's grade: C+

"Pride and Glory" stars Edward Norton as Ray Tierney, a New York cop from a New York cop family, which includes his brother Francis Jr. (Noah Emmerich, "Little Children") and father Francis Sr. (Jon Voight). Their lives are spent in constant balance along the thin blue line, trying to do right and serve the public good while watching out for "their own" at the same time. Francis Jr. is a precinct commander, and the balance is severely upset when four of his guys wind up dead in a slum tenement.

Ray, who has been in semiretirement since a mysterious snafu two years before, is cajoled into taking charge of the task force investigating the officers ' deaths. As he begins his investigation, the facts start leading to Jimmy (Colin Farrell, "Miami Vice"), who happens to be Ray and Francis's brother-in-law. As he pulls the loose threads, Ray, his brother and father are all pulled into a nest of conflicts between familial and job loyalties.

Like most cop dramas, this one is fueled by equal parts violence and machismo. While the cop families must come first, everything must be done according to the dictates of "the code," and those who violate the code pay a steep price. For these men, everything is filtered through their cop identities, and it never occurs to anyone that maybe they could avoid all the gut-wrenching mess and sorrow by going into a different line of work.

While "Pride and Glory" is well-made and features a solid leading cast, it's still a fairly typical entry for the genre, and one suspects it will prove to be a minor entry on the resumes of all those involved. R

"”Mike Robertson