Review by Stuart Barr
Stars Wagner Moura, Caio Junqueira, Andre Ramiro, Maria Ribeiro, Fernanda Machado, Fernanda De Freitas, Paulo Vilela , Irandhir Santos, Milhem Cortaz, Tainá Müller
Written by José Padilha & Bráulio Mantovani
Certification UK 18 | US R
Runtime 116 minutes
Directed by José Padilha
First things first, if you haven’t seen the first Elite Squad from 2007 don’t be put off. I haven’t seen it and had no trouble following the story perhaps because it takes a secondary character and puts him centre stage.
Set 10 years after the close of the original movie, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within focusses on Captain Nascimento (Moura) the leader of BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion), a quasi military unit of the police force tasked with anti drug operations in Rio de Janeiro. During a violent uprising in a maximum security prison, Nascimento’s unit is sent in. Matters are complicated by the arrival of a Civil Rights activist Diogo Fraga (Santos), who also happens to be living with Nascimento’s ex-wife and son. Fraga knows the inmate leading the riot and attempts to reason with him, but when he is himself taken hostage, BOPE officer Mathias takes matters into his own hands. The results are bloody and hand the left-wing activist Fraga a PR coup.
The police top brass and City Hall politicians want to hang Nascimento out to dry for the fiasco, but his popularity with the public means they instead promote him to a desk job and demote his friend Mathias to the records room. Although Nascimento argues for Mattias to remain a BOPE officer, he is unsuccessful and Mathias sees this as a personal betrayal. Moving forward Nascimento seizes on the opportunity of his new position to strengthen the BOPE and embarks on a brutal crusade against the drug dealers of Rio’s slums. This campaign is so successful it wipes out the criminal underclass but creates a power vacuum which quickly exploited by corrupt police officers and politicians to their own ends. Seduced by the glories of his successes and blindly faithful in Rio’s justice system Nascimento fails to notice that he has eradicated one set of gangsters only to allow a more insidious group to take control. In the crossfire the poor of Rio’s slums become even further exploited.
As Nasciamento’s star rises, so does that of Fraga who becomes an elected official and thorn in the side of the establishment. While the corrupt cops, politicians and militias increase their power Fraga and an ambitious young reporter set out gathering evidence that will expose the corruption. This is of course a dangerous game and soon Nascimento and his estranged family are drawn into the intrigue.
This is an extraordinarily brutal film, shot with documentary grit and great detail by Padilha. The film’s early sections are additionally uncomfortable as the story is narrated by Nascimento, a man whose fanatical pursuit of his goals by any means necessary borders on fascistic. In some ways it is as if Harry Callaghan had been promoted to City Hall at the end of Dirty Harry instead of being regarded as a violent disgrace to San Francisco’s police force. Like Don Siegel’s classic thriller, Elite Squad raises the question of whether a film centred upon a fascistic character is then itself a work of fascism. However as the web of corruption closes in around Nascimento the film’s true colours reveal themselves, and it becomes a bitter condemnation of the corruption of Rio’s politicians and law officers.
This isn’t as despairing a film as Mattieo Garrone’s Italian mafia drama Gomorrah however. Where that film had me contemplating the absence of God in the universe (no really), Padilha’s film is a more conventional (if ultra-violent) thriller and, in Moura’s character, gives us someone who is deeply conflicted, but still fulfils the role of a hero. This is also an extremely exciting film, full of action and gunplay that puts the audience right in the middle of some terrific shootouts that resemble the urban warfare of Black Hawk Down more than anything.
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is not a film for the fainthearted, it fully earns its 18 certificate for “strong bloody violence”, but for thriller fans dismayed at the how anaemic US action films seem to have become of late it is electrifying.