"Pride and Glory" is a downbeat, gritty cop drama with strong performances that off set predictability.

Director Gavin O’Connor  strives mightily for street cred, and he achieves his goal although it’s not always beneficial to the story he’s trying to tell. Sometimes, dialogue gets lost in the incessant background noise, and the restless camera work makes you wish  for a motion sickness pill.

Still, it’s an attention-holding portrait of an Irish-American family that chooses the New York Police Department as the family business.

Jon Voight plays  Francis Tierney Sr. , the patriarch and a hard-drinking, highly ranked official at the cop shop. Noah Emmerich  plays Francis Jr., an officer on his way up. Edward Norton plays brother Ray, a guy  who left the street for a desk job because of something disturbing in his past. Colin Farrell is Jimmy Egan, the brother-in-law who slips easily into the family fold.

This solid, loyal  family is severely tested after four cops are murdered in a shoot-out at a drug dealer’s apartment. Senior wants Ray to come back to the street to lead a task force into the shootings, and Ray reluctantly agrees. The murdered policemen fell under both Junior and Jimmy’s command.

It doesn’t take the story much time to establish the fact that dirty cops are involved, and this is the point that leads to the many conflicts among the characters. Where does the loyalty to a moral compass diverge from a loyalty to the institution — and brotherhood — that’s become a way of life? And where does family loyalty play into all of this?

O’Connor manages to put his own stamp on a sub-genre constructed on police corruption and officer brotherhood. It’s a long-standing and tireless staple, from “Dirty Harry” to L.A. retro noir.

To O’Connor’s credit, he attempts to give these embattled cops a back story. There’s Francis Sr.’s  drinking;  Francis Jr.’s  wife dying of cancer; Ray’s broken marriage; and Jimmy’s Norman Rockwell home life.

But O’Connor lets his movie run away from him. The melancholy rumination on conflicted loyalties that sustains most of the movie finally degenerates into a swamp of improbablities. The result is a cop movie that aspires to seriousness but finally falls victim to one big cliche and a sense of desperation as it tries to bring its proceedings to a close.