However skilful Gavin O’Connor is as a film-maker — and there are some striking sequences here — we’ve seen this corrupt cop thriller a hundred times before. One presumes he is attempting something like the TV series The Wire, but based in New York.

The story follows a family torn between loyalty to each other and the NYPD and upholding American justice. It has passages of arrant melodrama and an ending that defies logic.

Four members of the police department are found dead and the veteran chief of Manhattan detectives (Jon Voight) asks his upright son Ray (Edward Norton) to lead the investigation. The murdered cops served under Ray’s brother Francis (Noah Emmerich) and alongside his brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell).

Soon he realises that someone tipped off the drug dealers who did the deed that the cops had been alerted. And the evidence gets nearer and nearer to home. Dad wants the whole thing hushed up for the sake of the department. Ray refuses.

O’Connor paints a dark, dank and gloom-ridden view of New York and his actors, who include the excellent Jennifer Ehle, notable as Francis’s cancer-stricken wife, are certainly no slouches. But while the whole is much better than Righteous Kill, the recent De Niro/Pacino police thriller, it still isn’t entirely convincing.

Since it was written partly by an ex-cop who knew what he was talking about, it illustrates well how the police stick together to protect their best interests. But melodrama is often close and the ending passes all understanding.