Phooey and Ptooey
Why did I bother to see Pride and Glory? Oh right, Colin Farrell and Edward Norton are in it. I figured that no matter how bad it got (the trailer is unpromising) I could entertain myself with the quiz question: Which one would you run away with, Edward or Colin? Edward is a marvelous actor, I’ve been a fan since he wiped Richard Gere off the screen in Primal Fear, he killed in 25th Hour, plus he’s not a bad writer-director although he has a reputation for being difficult and demanding final cut even when he’s not the director, and he did a good Woody Allen impression in Everyone Says I Love You. Colin, though wonderfully talented, has starred in mostly terrible movies, but has the rare distinction of appearing in a sex video that made him look sweet, and isn’t that the prime requirement for someone to run away with.Â
None of these could comfort me as Chus and I sat through Pride and Glory. It is singularly awful, badly-written, cliche-ridden, incompetently-directed, overheated drivel. The good son, bad son-in-family-of-cops story was recently retold in James Gray’s excellent We Own The Night with Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg; why was this movie made at all? My guess is that director Gavin O’Connor has some truly horrendous dirt on Norton and Farrell—in the case of the latter it would have to be epically horrendous because we’ve seen Alexander and we know about the drinking and Britney Spears—and he used it to blackmail them into appearing in this piece of crap. Nothing they do can save this trite, lumbering mess—when the bad cop threatens to iron a baby, you feel not horror but “Whatever”, and when he goes to meet his death and his last words turn out to be “Tell her I love her”, the only proper response is, “Kill him, shut him up.”Â
My eyelids began to feel very heavy during the movie, and when I got home after an early dinner I immediately fell asleep. You know how the brain protects itself by forgetting a traumatic occurrence? My brain was trying to protect itself by not watching this movie. Pride and Glory makes The Incredible Hulk and Alexander the Great look like masterpieces.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 10th, 2008 at 23:37
I personally think The Incredible Hulk was better, albeit mushier (though Marvel and the director/writers admit this) than the first one. So at a scale of 5 stars, 5 being best, what’s the verdict on Pride and Glory? 2 stars perhaps? :)
December 11th, 2008 at 13:12
They just wanted to do a de Niro and Pacino, my guess.
December 12th, 2008 at 16:35
There are a lot of baaad movies showing today. Didn’t bother with this one because the trailer seems like it is a rehash of that recent Pacino-De Niro tandem, which was way boring. I think Hollywood has got to think of ways to make cop movies more exciting, or that genre might suffer a slow death. Quarantine is yucky. As expected, The Day the Earth Stood Still disappointed me too,because Keanu is there. Ho humm. I can’t imagine that the world will be eaten away by tiny ipis-like microorganisms. Also, as JZ observed years ago, it seems most of the Hollywood disaster blockbuster movies for the past decade were commissioned by either the CIA,FBI,KGB,MIA,Pentagon, and other top military and intelligence groups. In these movies, they always play a major role. Meanwhile, Batman is also the new John Connor. Seen the Batpod in the latest Terminator trailer. Maybe they needed to maximize their props and the stars. Or maybe Bale loved it so much he suggested to use it again in a different movie.
December 14th, 2008 at 23:32
i imagine norton is not the kind of guy one runs away with, but runs away from. courtney love called him the greatest love of her life. jeebus, he slept with courtney love!!! eyuw. pass.