Elite Squad

The affiliation with the famous film City of God is distant and takes place purely on a thematic level. Elite Squad looks at the problem of favelas, poverty, and crime from a completely different angle and uses different film techniques. It is the personal confession of the commander of a special police unit in the form of his inner commentary, complemented by a shaky handheld camera that creates a semi-documentary impression. The craftsmanship of the film amounts to a weak 4 stars. What bothers me is the ideological foundation from which Elite Squad stems. The main character is an elitist who seems to have come straight out of Armin the Knight from Vláčil's film The Valley of the Bees. Armin would let the angels survive, but Nascimento wants to exterminate society to such an extent that the result would be similar. There are very few contemporary films that so prominently promote a right-wing authoritarian and elitist ideology. The film is essentially a defense of the creation and operation of the notorious Brazilian E.M., motorized brigades of the São Paulo police that have been "cleansing" the city of child street gangs since the 1960s and have come to be called death squads. The film's protagonist wants to heal the criminality and corruption of the system through executions and torture. Overall impression: 40%. (22/09/2010)

I did not find any exorbitant political incorrectness in Elite Squad. The film provides no instant solutions to a sad situation, nothing gives hope, and if it does provide something, then it is a rather appalling picture of decaying justice and its humiliated servants. Personally, I was quite convinced by invectives toward left-wing intellectuals from good families, and I was able to identify with Captain Nascimento's views, although the depicted effects of the Crusades on justice evoke appalling feelings. What I really like about the film and find healthily provocative is the fact that the operation in the slums is initiated by the Pope's visit. This strange virtual detachment of civilization from the devastated world of slums and the effort to seek in it a kind of nobility of poverty contrasts well with the aspect of the glued and formatted "black" brains from BOPE. We can argue about where the truth is, but the fact remains that Padilha does not offer any. And if it is on the side of brutality of the men of the law, from my point of view, it does so because a) I am able to identify with it, b) even if I did not identify with it, it is still an aspect I want to know about. BTW, the film is technically brilliant. (14/10/2009)

I won't deny that in the first half of the film I was still about two minutes ahead of the scene playing out and it was getting on my nerves a bit. The cinematography was confusing with its disjointedness, the frantic and not-so-skillfully strung together editing, the nonsensical voiceover, the confused characters and timelines, and especially the lack of any memorable scene sure did their part. However, in the second half there is brilliant, severely incorrect, brutal, and escalating violence. (02/05/2011)

Rio de Janeiro isn’t just a sunny city with Jesus standing on a hill. The slums are overflowing with drugs (and trash), and cops’ pockets with money. Because the men from BOPE are here, doing what is necessary, using whatever means necessary. The direction is marvelous, visually inventive and the screenplay develops on several ideas with huge social implications at once. Whether suffocation by plastic bag or fighting against the system (while still keeping your job), it always hits a nerve. So where would you like to go on holiday? To Rio? (29/05/2013)

If the entire film was only about the training of the new members of the “elite squad”, the only thing that would bother me would be the ideological aftertaste left by almost every scene. But Elite Squad has many more things that bothered me: there isn’t a lot of action, and when there is some, it’s not very clear, half the scenes are pointless, the subplots are uninteresting, the script goes nowhere and there are many ugly male characters that (other than the main trio) I could never tell apart. To tell you the truth, after half an hour I was already looking forward to the end (and I kept on looking forward until the end). (21/04/2011)