We need a word, sort of like deja vu, to describe the feeling one gets when you're convinced that you've seen this before. How about deja view? There were times during the unreeling of “;Pride and Glory”; when I was halfway convinced this was a sequel to a film I had forgotten. It was all too familiar. It didn't help that the characters kept referring to an incident, apparently well-known to them, that occurred in the past; that is, before the start of this film. The police detective played by Edward Norton even wears a nasty scar as a result of that earlier incident. It must mean something.

But no. The scar is just window dressing, a way of slapping some pretend verisimilitude on an underwritten character. The whole of “;Pride and Glory”; is much in the same boat. The incident? Fuhgeddaboutit, it don't play in this borough.

Stop if you've been here before: Multigenerational police family in New York, heavy on the Catholic guilt and redemptive despair. The NYPD is the second family for these characters, a fraternal bond that chokes as much as it buoys, and there's a lot of macho blather about departmental loyalty and being a “;stand-up guy.”; There are straight cops and crooked cops and it's not so much hard to sort them out as it is murky - that's the not-hidden agenda of the screenplay's arc - and everything looks scummy and filthy and dark and foreboding. Can you guess an internal investigation will be derailed for political reasons?

Here's comes a police funeral, complete with the rows of blue uniforms under a leaden sky, with a bagpiper skirling a mournful note, and naturally, the next scene takes place in an Irish bar with the Pogues on the jukebox. And here comes the scene where there's a confused shootout in a crackhouse where things go awry. How about that holdup in the corner bodega where the innocent guy in Aisle Three gets whacked by accident? How about that weaselly cop kicked off the team, the guy who ought to be wearing a T-shirt reading I Will Eat My Pistol At the End of Act Two? Oh, the agita.

The New York Police Drama has become it's own cliche genre, a landscape as familiar as the most programmed Western. Even the title of “;Pride and Glory”; has no significance beyond invoking a vaguely ironic meme of police familial bonds. The sense of deja view is overwhelming.

New York Police Dramas are generally showcases for actors anxious to display street-cred chops. Although Edward Norton is rather blank as the Means Well Brother, Colin Farrell is all testosterone and bundled fury as the Dark Secret Brother, and Noah Emmerich makes no impact at all as Corporate Stooge Brother, Jon Voight as Hard-Drinking Old-School Father manages to make something of his well-worn role.

One clue is the language. You can't make a New York Police Drama without dropping an f-bomb into every line. But speaking in such a manner has a style and a swing to the cadence of the speech. Here, the f-bombs sound randomly inserted into ordinary dialogue. There's no meter to it. It just sounds forced and artificial and dumb, and, well, there you have “;Pride and Glory.”;

On the technical side, the camerawork by Declan Quinn has a jittery naturalness to it that's quite extraordinary, particularly the night scenes. I suspect hi-def video was used, with no artificial lighting.