Honor Amongst Men?

Don’t even ask.

John Halmo (Robert Clohessy) is a veteran cop who is been on the job for so long that he wears a dinosaur pin.  The film portrays one very long day on Long Island, as John deals with cocky young cops, squabbling drug addicts, his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father (Ed Asner), and a motorcycle gang war.  Chuck Zito plays the the main motorcycle baddie.  Joan Jett plays Stephanie, who spend a lot of time yelling.  It’s cool to see Joan Jett in a movie.

Why is Chuck Zito such an unconvincing biker in this?  He was a member of the Hell’s Angels for twenty-five years.  He did time for the gang.  If anyone should have felt authentic in this movie, it was Chuck Zito.  But Zito seems lost.  Maybe it’s the bad CGI that the movie uses whenever Zito shoots someone.  Bad CGI and a bad performance.

Robert Clohessy is good, though.  Clohessy’s been playing tough cops since the start of his career.  Hill Street Blues, Oz, Blue Bloods, NYPD Blue, Homicide, Ohara (a show the featured Pat Morita as a detective), all of them featured Clohessy as a cop.  Clohessy gives a great performance in Honor Amongst Men.  It’s too bad that the rest of this disjointed film isn’t as good.

Honor Amongst Men is a film that wants to say something about how the world is changing and how there’s less room for honorable men like John Halmo.  John is being pressured to retire.  His father is losing his ability to remember the past.  Even Chuck Zito is just a man looking for old-fashioned revenge.  A lot of good movies have been made about honorable men suddenly finding themselves in a world where honor is disappearing and Clohessy’s performance is good enough that this movie’s message sometimes comes through.  But the movie itself is disjointed and features too many scenes that just don’t work, either because everyone other than Clohessy’s is overacting or because the director lets them drag on for too long.  Good intentions can only go so far.