rated R

Stereotypes and clichés may save time, but they don’t make for very interesting movies. “Pride and Glory,” the saga of a family of ethically challenged New York police officers, is more than content to go over already well-worn territory, but the movie’s greatest crime is the unwarranted sense of gravitas it adopts. The movie is so wrapped up in hammering out the usual high-minded ideals (loyalty, family, honor and so on) that it winds up tripping over itself with utterly foolish moments and a meandering, unsatisfying story.

Maybe “Pride and Glory” just hasn’t aged well. In development since 2001, the movie was shelved following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In the meantime, films like “The Departed,” “Mystic River” and “We Own the Night” perfected the formula of strong ensemble casts thrown into a cop/criminal family potboiler. “Pride and Glory” feels like it’s a few years too late, and the movie suffers for it.

Leading the cast is Edward Norton as Ray Tierney, a cerebral cop reluctant to get back on the street after a brush with death. Ray’s dad (played by Jon Voight) throws him on a special task force investigating the shooting of four cops in a squalid tenement. As Ray pieces together the clues left at the crime scene, he finds they all connect to his brother-in-law and fellow cop, Jimmy (Colin Farrell). Even worse, Ray’s brother Francis (Noah Emmerich), who heads up Jimmy’s precinct, may be implicitly involved. Ray pushes the investigation, tensions mount within the family and the NYPD, and all the conflicts explode one winter evening.

Norton, Voight and the rest of the principal cast are all very strong, but the burden they carry is never as powerful as director and co-writer Gain O’Connor would have you believe. Not even Ray seems that conflicted about protecting his family or police brethren from the scandal, and the dynamics of the Tierney family are so hastily sketched out that when the brothers all come to blows, the moment lacks any real punch. Peripheral characters like Sandy (John Ortiz), a member of Jimmy’s crew of corrupt cops, end up having real conflicts about their actions, but they get shoved to the sideline in favor of the powerhouse principals.

Most of “Pride and Glory” is taken up with the usual cat-and-mouse antics of corrupt cop movies. The bad-cop brother tries to stay one step ahead of his good-cop brother and keep his criminal compatriots at bay, family loyalty is tested, internal affairs investigators are called in and so on. O’Connor’s screenplay follows the formula to the letter, but so many loose ends are left dangling at the end that a kind of scorched-earth climax is employed to wrap everything up. Some larger, more interesting ideas show up—protests about crooked cops targeting minorities, racial tensions in the department—but O’Connor doesn’t seem to have a real handle on them. Things get out of control fast, but any tension is dispelled by a ridiculous barroom brawl between Norton and Farrell, complete with whiskey and Irish music. At least no one is wearing a Notre Dame sweatshirt, but that’s not saying much.

“Pride and Glory” is an exercise in adequacy, and that’s only because Norton and the rest of the cast shore up what would otherwise be a poor retread of past crime dramas. Sticking your main thematic beats in the film’s title is a good way to get your point across quickly, but it takes more than that to fill in the hollow spaces where originality belongs.