COLIN Farrell is no stranger to Toronto - we told you a few weeks back about a homeless guy living in the city who he helped set on the straight and narrow - but he wasn't up north last week for the film festival premiere of his new film Pride and Glory, an Irish American cop drama which opens nationwide next month.

Pride and Glory, which also stars Ed Norton and Jon Voight, received ho-hum reviews from the critics on hand; some good, some bad, which is pretty much par for the course as far as Colin's career is concerned. Ya think one of these years Colin will ever star in a film that gets raves and makes some coin for its producers in the process?

Time magazine was, how shall we say, not kind. "With its twisty plot . . . and the higher depths of cop corruption, this movie should have been way better than it is; it lurches between the numbingly banal and the laughably awful," wrote the reviewer. "By the movie's climax, which discards the standard sibling shootout for bare-knuckles barroom machismo, and throws in the instant insanity of a secondary character that nearly stokes a race riot, Pride and Glory has waived all rights to a dispassionate verdict."

Trade paper Variety also wasn't sold. "Heavy, doom-laden and, unfortunately, entirely predictable, director Gavin O'Connor's murky drama applies epic aspirations to a story all too familiar from any number of films and TV shows. New Line sat on the film for so long it ran out of time to release it, so the task falls to Warner Bros. to try to milk a few bucks out of it, which won't be easy," sniffed the critic there.

But all is not lost. The Hollywood Reporter raved, saying the film "harkens back to Sidney Lumet classics like Serpico and Prince of the City, filmmaking that went after an unadorned, jagged realism, with acting to match."

So who knows? Norton rarely throws out a stinker, and Farrell can certainly act, as we've seen in the past (the awful Oliver Stone-directed Alexander the one glaring exception).

The film has been in the can for quite some time, as filming started all the way back in February of 2006 and wrapped a few months afterward. The aforementioned New Line studios ran into difficulties of its own and was forced to abandon the film not because of a lack of faith, but rather a lack of funds.

"There's this rumor going around that (Pride and Glory has been bumped) because it's a mess or it's a really bad film," Farrell said earlier this year. "I feel the need to kind of speak up, not from my own end but genuinely for Gavin O'Connor because he wrote and directed it. It's just a really, really strong piece, but I think New Line lost their bollocks on The Golden Compass.and they literally don't have enough money to market things."