A detonation of flatulent, macho-sentimental gibberish is what this ugly and violent film positively farts out of the screen at you.

Colin Farrell and Edward Norton star as New York City cops, part of an extended Irish-American clan for whom the NYPD is a family tradition. Jon Voight plays the grey-haired paterfamilias and top-ranking officer: a troubled authority figure at both the family home and the station house.

When four officers are shot in a bloody brawl in a city drug den, Norton discovers a web of conspiracy and corruption involving family members: corners cut, money taken, moral dividing lines blurred. The tough guys are persistently choked up with self-pity and self-importance, and the combination of violence and sentimentality is nauseating. Grotesquely, the picture finally appears to suggest that corruption issues can be healed with a good old-fashioned barroom punch-up. One to miss.