Review: Elite Squad
Filed under: Action, Drama, Foreign Language, Thrillers, Theatrical Reviews, The Weinstein Co.
It's rare that a good film will irritate me, but it happened at least fifteen times during the rather intense Brazilian import Elite Squad, and here's why: The film is saddled with an omnipresent voice-over narration from the main character, and this running commentary deflates, detracts, and nearly ruins every GOOD thing about the movie. Every time the viewer is offered a chance to think for himself, make a decision about a specific character, or draw a moral conclusion about the onscreen mayhem -- up pops the stunningly unnecessary voice-over monologue. After a while it starts to feel like the filmmakers simply don't trust your intelligence, and so they insist on explaining every scene, every theme, and every possible motivation the characters might have. It's a damn good thing that Elite Squad has some other very solid assets in its corner, because that narration almost kills the whole movie.
Based on the book Elite da Tropa by Andre Batista, Rodrigo Pimentel, and Luiz Soares, Elite Squad takes us inside two very different Rio de Janiero police units. On one end we have the "regular" police, most of whom are either sickeningly corrupt or simply ineffective. On the other side we have the BOPE, which is Brazil's ultra-elite unit of peace-keeping ass-kickers. Even the regular cops step to the side when the "elite squad" arrives on the scene, and it's the leader of this unit who becomes our entry point.
Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) has a plan to retire from the dangerous squad, since his wife has a baby on the way and the Captain is tired of being shot at by drug dealers three times a week. In an effort to find his new replacement, Nascimento keeps his eye on two young recruits: One a straight arrow who aims to be a lawyer one day, and the other a hot-headed idealist who doesn't mind cracking heads. The rest of the characters are either corrupt cops, slimy villains, or snooty college kids who never really stop to think where their weed comes from -- and at what cost -- but for the most part we're sticking with the increasingly desperate Nascimento, the volatile Nito (Caio Junqueira), and the stoic Matias (Andre Ramiro).
At its best, Elite Squad is a powerfully gritty, slyly engrossing, and unapologetically brutal story of cops, crooks, and the (very few) people in between -- but much of the film also feels like an obvious flip-side to Fernando Merielles' vastly superior City of God. Fans of simple "good guys and bad guys and the horrific things they do to one another" will find some solid roughage in Elite Squad, but the movie never gets nearly as introspective or insightful as Meirelles' film. And even when Elite Squad does offer some moral gristle worth chewing on, we're instantly assaulted with yet another volley from the narration track telling us what we just saw and how we should feel about it.
The three leads are uniformly excellent, and director Jose Padilha does a consistently fine job of creating a world that's both fascinating and horrifying (not to mention sweaty and intense), but it's really difficult to "get into" a movie that keeps interrupting itself every four minutes. For all its worthwhile components and admirable audacity, Elite Squad stands as an exotic cop story with a pretty simplistic message (hey, corruption is bad and so are drug dealers) and a clumsy narrative gimmick that mars the movie at almost every turn. Sorry for carping on it so redundantly, but if you yank that ceaseless narration track, Elite Squad is -- in numerous ways -- a much better movie.
Peter Jackson Says Spielberg's 'Tintin' is Done Filming, but...
Interracial Harmony: 'Ninja Assassin' vs. 'Blind Side'
Spin-ematical: New on DVD for 11/24_thumbnail.jpg)
Exclusive 'Nine' Poster Premiere!
Exclusive: Title Track for 'The Road' Soundtrack
_thumbnail.jpg)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-19-2008 @ 9:11PM
DivinoAG said...
Your comment is spot on. The movie might have some good things going for it, but those problems just overshadow them.
Just wanted to point out that the original name in portuguese is Tropa de Elite, not Elite da Tropa (this would be directly translated as Elite of the Squad, which would not mean much).
Reply
9-20-2008 @ 1:36PM
monstermac said...
Good grief, is this film laughably FASCIST.
Fucking unbelievable. It's almost like you'd wish Charles Bronson, Dirty Harry and Rambo would come to Brazil and kick these horrid try-hard fuckers in the face with cleats. And that bullshit director. Like, beat the shit out of their desperate humping of law and order & security for personal strength,into tell them exactly how the unrepentant manly killer vigilante bussiness is really don't. If anything, it's by absolutely NOT apologizing on behalf anybody. And this fuck-up of a film is spineless-ly all over that !
The film is hard-pressed justifying it's very existence. There are no actual gritted-teeth, punch in the gut, engrossing action stuff you could at least see in stuff like Black Hawk Down and The Shield and appreciate. Meaning not much of the full-on brutality you'd at least expect from this work. No one wants to see already-helpless beggars being suffocated by plastic bags, we want to see them hitting on the bastards moviegoers we utterly want demolished. The red meat stuff, the fun stuff. We don't want to get a passing glance at the lead guys targetting the corrupt cop motherfuckers with the sniper, with zero brain splattering at the pavement. Coz that's what got our appetites whetted for with that marketing package. I mean if they're that hardpressed playing with their Soldier and Fortune magazines, and fetish for guns, might as well play that shit right, you know? Might as well play the audiences right. Nobody is really interested in your converting out of the human race, Padilha! Simple, really.
This is not a liberal diatribe, or something. It's about me as a moviegoer looking for a fricking solid action movie ( which is what this one yearns to be ), tapping into common desire of satisfying catharsis, against more worthy types we'd expect to more or less get. Instead we get torture and bullying. Dammit.
You get the sense that the makers were like former college liberal types, coming off from making art-film stuff, who violently swung to the neo-right direction, after their decadence sort of wore them out. They're visibly clutching at straws in that with their masculinist narrative pandering, and only end up clumsily walking in their newfound militarism. And everytime, it's nauseating. So, instead of the uber-liberal track of Alfonso Cuaron et al. of ' I'm so emancipated ! We're all so feeling our intellectuality ! The world would be a better place if we're just shagging ! Let's denigrate these bunch of whore chicks and feed off our liberation through them....'; you get ' oh , screw you woman ( who is my wife ), and the sex that you give me. I will beat you for the government to protect my right to be ' bad-ass '. '. Either w/c does NOT stand up to genuinely provocative, questioning '70s cinema they were desperately trying to coopt, while abandoning their intellectual cool and values. ' Flipside ', indeed.
Reply
9-20-2008 @ 1:44PM
monstermac said...
That's ' exactly how the unrepentant manly killer vigilante bussiness is really DONE.'. Typo.
Reply
9-21-2008 @ 10:27PM
Rafael said...
Man... I'm Brazilian... this movie is exatally our reality and that's what the autoers would like to have showed. Whatch this movie with this in your mind "oh God, this is true". In general Hollywood's movies show a different kind of action. But "Elite squad" isn't from Hollywood. =] Come here and watch the news. You would see a "Elit squad" per day. This is the nice point
9-22-2008 @ 1:59PM
Guilherme Louzada said...
Is THIS fascism?!?
This movie is the cruel reality that a few people that try to maintain the order lives every day. If you think that's rude, ugly and everything else, stop smoking your weed, because that is exactly your money is working for: to run a ugly and rude machine that is shown on the movie. That is REAL.
This is not Rambo or Charles Bronson, this is NOT fiction, THIS IS REAL. You guys from U.S. don't know, but SWATT teams come to Brazil to take training on how to deal with heavy-armed gangs. Brazilian cops in Rio faces with granades and another heavy weapons every day. Whe have a Bagdahd INSIDE our country. And you can´t fight against crazy terrorists asking them "please, can you stop shooting me and come to be arrested?" . You, americans, knows this better then us...
Some of you don't know how the REAL WORLD works, the rest of the world is more close to NY in 9/11, you should know that.
Reply
9-22-2008 @ 3:52PM
NP said...
I felt like the point of the voice-over was actually the opposite of what you all seem to believe. Not that it was there to tell us what to think, but there as a challenge by the director, a challenge for us to disagree with the Captain's interpretation of events. The Captain is our main point of identification in the film, but it's uncomfortable to hear some of his thoughts and beliefs, to witness the practices of the BOPE.
Reply
9-23-2008 @ 6:13PM
John Smith Sanders said...
This is, maybe, one of the best films I have ever watched. Two thumbs up!
Reply
9-23-2008 @ 6:17PM
Joseph Neuman said...
For god!!! I spent my whole night thinking about the things I watched in this film.
Reply
9-30-2008 @ 5:22PM
Joao Cunha said...
First of all, spend at least 3 months in Rio, reading the newspapers and watching the news. Than you will realize how many "Rambos" and "Marlon Brandos" are living there.
Just don't say that what I see every single day on the streets is Hollywood, ok?
Reply
10-28-2008 @ 3:08PM
Carlos Maurício said...
What´a beutiful vision of a journalist protected in his "bubble" and who doesn`t know nothing about the social problems outside the USA! It´s a pitty an article full of prejudice and with no intelligence.
Reply
11-22-2008 @ 12:23AM
Nathan said...
I completely disagree with the poster who felt that this film is the product of a fascist filmmaker--would a fascist filmmaker also direct Bus 174? To color this film so black-and-white is also to ignore the fact that it practically begs analysis: the best interpretation of Foucault's Discipline and Punish in the film happens to come from the one black man and the only cop in a class full of middle-class white elites who, at the end of the narrative arc of the film, actually realizes Foucault's insistence that the brutalizing nature of the State continually perpetuates violence. Some fascist director--worse than Leni, hunh?
I also agree with the ealier poster about the narration when he/she writes "Not that it was there to tell us what to think, but there as a challenge by the director, a challenge for us to disagree with the Captain's interpretation of events." The film reminds me of the controversy surrounding Pier Pasolini taking the side of the police against the young Italian intelligentsia of 1968 because the cops were from the poor while the students were squarely middle-class--this film continually challenges our alliances with the Left and/or the Right, in part because power doesn't work in so simplistic a manner.
Reply