Review: ‘Elite Squad’ LAFF 08

The realities of crime and corruption in Rio de Janiero are not completely new to audiences, thanks to work like 2002’s City of God and its Showtime TV spin-off City of Men. The plight of the slums gets dragged into the daylight again with Elite Squad, a film set in contemporary Rio where the only thing worse than the drug lords guarding their turf are the crooked cops who run their own gamuts alongside them. When there’s no clean police force left to do what has to be done, in comes the elite crew, otherwise known as BEPO (aka Special Police Operation Battalion). Under the command of their leader, Captain Nascimento, BEPO is the absolute last stop in the war against crime, and they’re not afraid to fight fire with fire. From questioning suspects with gruesome beatings and leaving gang members to be killed by their own, to a particularly horrifying interrogation technique referred to as ‘bagging’, BEPO makes it known that they’re dressed in black, not blue, for a reason. However, being the best defense against the worst of the city doesn’t come cheap.

It seems the Captain is suffering from a nervous breakdown, and he wants out. The events of Elite Squad unfold as Captain Nascimento searches for a replacement tough enough and merciless enough to fill his role so he can abandon his public role and return intact to his pregnant wife and the impending birth of their child. Easier said than done, when an upcoming visit from the Pope to the slums demands that BEPO be at the absolute top of their game, amid the very worst that the drug trade has to offer. Apparently all based on actual events of the real world BEPO, Elite Squad is violent beyond words, with every gunshot threatening to rattle the audience directly out of their seats. It approaches the edge of exploitation, and I likely would’ve remained in that frame of thought had I not known that the world it offers its audience is already in existence. Odd that a film like The Strangers can be marketed falsely as “Based on Actual Events” to help sell it, yet something as raw as Elite Squad gets no mention of its reality in its marketing. Brutal and unrelenting, the film squirms at practically nothing as Nascimento makes human sacrifices of his chosen replacements by assuring that the one who holds his title will be broken of any and all illusions about hope or happy endings.

Elite Squad is very popular in its native Brazil, with over 12 million illegal downloads of the film before it ever screened in a theater. With its popularity comes the controversy behind its decision to glorify the police brutality seen via Nascimento’s POV, and the sleek packaging of the film doesn’t argue much against it. In the wrong hands, this is a film that becomes almost irresponsible in its depiction of violent enforcement of the law as heroic, yet the skill of the film-making is undeniable. The film’s director Josà © Padilha is well known for his previous documentary Bus 174, which detailed the hostage situation aboard a city bus by an armed man. Then as now, Padilha takes up a position with a character of highly questionable decision making, and does his best merely to follow the path that man chooses for himself. His work here is bold and unflinching, and my recommendation of it comes with the disclaimer that I hope it’s received with the proper level of horror towards its truthful content, and not just as another summer shoot ’em up with subtitles.

[rating: 4/5]