Good Cop, Bad Cop

Pride and Glory
Starring Collin Farell, Edward Norton
Duration: 2hr 10 min
Genre: Crime /Drama
I found the title quite deceptive and in retrospect, quite apt. I had seen a film titled Pride (starring Terrence Howard) and another titled Glory (Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington) and one thing could be said about these films. Beyond having a substantial Black cast, they appealed to the black experience.
Pride and Glory however doesn’t. At least not in a frank manner, I mean. It deals with something more encompassing. And by virtue of dealing with a global (mis)deed, it appeals to the human experience.
Corruption especially within Law enforcement, we can safely assume from the amount of Hollywood movies that theme on it, is not a strictly African problem. I have seen L.A cop, Black Dahlia, to mention a few and all these films point out the savagery human is capable of especially once placed in an exalted position.
Only yesterday I was having a conversation about a review of The Known World by Edward P. Jones in Farafina Magazine. And this review was contemptuous in its dealings with P. Jones’s version of slavery amongst the same race; amongst blacks that is. I not only found it repugnant and but shallow. The Pulitzer winner was ascribing a universal rather than racial fault to slavery. He meant that if a ‘role swap’ occurs and blacks happened to be on the other side of the Atlantic, on the side of civilization, they probably would perpetrate even worse deeds. And it’s true.
Let’s take corruption in Nigeria for instance. Roger (20 naira) is a mandatory fee all transporters most pay in Lagos. How about illegal road blocks, civilian harassment in all forms of display and all other acts of corruption law enforcement agencies indulge in? Perhaps this trivializes the more extreme forms patronized by cops in the movie Pride and Glory, but it also vitalizes the essence of Jones’s theme that slavery is not a problem of humans and not of race
A family of cops—father, two sons and a son-in-law—are in the nexus of the film reel. Sons look up father as some sort of idol cop, and often take to his counsel. Ray Tienery(Edward Norton) has a previous history of listening to his father, which led the collapse of his marriage. And now, his brother’s precinct is blacklisted on account of corruption. And there is evidence of his brother’s laxity, consequence of his wife’s cancer, and the man-in-charge (son-in –law/Collin Farell) as linchpins of the ‘bad cop racket’ perpetrating evils such as bribery, drug-dealing, armed robbery, extensively.
Ray is at the crossroads again, the only man who can pin his sister’s husband to the crime. His father has an idea on how to fix this amicably and salvage the family. But Ray chose to be upright this time; he decides to do what is right. It might not be gainsaying that Justice was not served especially in the manner of the son-in-law’s death. He subjected himself to jungle justice. He wasn’t condemned in the confines of the law to which he had deterred. But rather he suffered within the confines of humanity. In the confines of the maxim, man shall die by what he lives.