Review of Elite Squad (2007) by Jack L — 08 Jul 2010

After I read Jaythegoodfella's excellent review, I decided to watch this film as I like police/gangster films but had never heard of this one.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD....

The film takes place in Rio de Janeiro in the late 90's and is based of some memoires written by a Sociologist and two members of the BOPE.

The film's intent is obviously to let the world know about the BOPE, a specialist force of men that (even though they only number about 100) are called in every time the regular Police have difficulty. The regular police force are so corrupt that only the BOPE can be entrusted with crucial missions.

The film focuses on Captain Nascimento, a BOPE officer who is dedicated to his unit and what they fight for yet is forced to retire seeing as his son is about to be born.

The role of the BOPE is so important to the city (without them the whole city would be dominated by drug dealers) that Nascimento is unwilling to retire before having found the perfect replacement.

We are then introduced to two students who have become Policemen, André and Neto. They are both young and very willing to help their city yet the rampant corruption in the Police force ,that reaches right to the top, stops them from progressing since they are unwilling to be corrupted and want to stay "straight". After many bad experiences they decide to join the BOPE in whose ranks they will be treated with respect and amongst whom they will actually be able to achieve something.

They volunteer for membership but the training proves to be one of the harshest one the planet, it is designed to force the weaker members to quit so as to save them from being killed later during combat.

They succeed in all the trials and become members of the elite force. Nascimento notices how skilled they are and starts preparing them to be his successors.

But the training hadn't succeeded in making them the barely human and heartless killing machines they needed to be to fight the drug dealers, it takes one final tragedy to do that.

The direction in this film was easily the weakest aspect, the shaky-cam is used throughout much of the film and can be confusing and very disorientating. The basic camera movements were also quite frustrating, sometimes they stopped where they should have continued for longer or vice-versa. The pacing on this film was pretty intense, with chases through he slums and gunfights throughout, but also takes the time to develop it's characters in a satisfactory way.

The acting was good from the whole cast, nothing exceptional but nothing horrendous either. The three leads all do a great job with my favorite being André Romero as André, he gave the best performance in my opinion. The actors that played the wealthy middle-class young adults were very convincing and I really grew to hate them during the film.

The soundtrack was quite good, even though there is barely any music. The gun sounds all seemed very realistic.

The dialogue is entirely in Portuguese so I wasn't able to understand it, but I thought the subtitles were very poorly translated and often didn't make much sense, I did like the fact that the sub-titles were always positioned under or near the person talking which made it easier to understand.

The nearly continous voice-over by Captain Nacsimento often gets annoying but serves it's purpose and keeps the viewer informed throughout, in fact without it I would have been rather confused.

The characters were pretty interesting even though the only ones that are suitably developed are Andre, Neto and the Captain. The rest are all right but I thought more attention should have been paid to the Drug dealers who are the villains of this film. I though the corrupt police were all well portrayed, as were the wealthy middle class kids who hated the police and supplied the drug dealers with money.

The plot was very extreme, this is a film that has strong social ideas and opinions and isn't afraid to express them, that is why I gave this film 80%. Even though many people will probably disagree, I found the ideas in this film to be very true and I agreed with many of them.

Some people have claimed that this is a pro-fascist film that encourages violence, well I really don't agree, this film is just showing how things have gotten out of control in Brazil and I think people should be grateful to what the men of the BOPE do every day, for without them Rio would be one big favela swarming with dealers. They put there life on the line every day for ungrateful people who fear and despise them only because they represent order when the people (and especially the middle class kids) seem more drawn by the lawlessness of the drug dealers.

The training that these men go through is the most extreme I've ever seen and serves it's purpose well (even though only 5 or 6 men out of 100 actually succeed in becoming members), this group of men don't do it for money (they get 500 a month) or for power but they do it for everyone, even though it means sacrificing a large part of their humanity in the process.

Overall this is an eye-opening film that delivers a powerful message that some people just can't deal with. I liked it, but its definitely not for everyone as it contains many scenes of extreme and realistic violence and some torture sequences.

Highly recommended for anyone looking for a view on the modern stats of crime in Brazil that doesn't glamorize violence or the lifestyle of a gangster.