Elite Squad wants to be City of God so badly, it’s a bit painful to watch. Jose Padilha shows little confidence when it comes to staging action or providing character development that he rips off that earlier, better Brazilian crime epic time and time again. This time it’s the usual drug wars from the cops’ point of view. The titular Squad is the amusingly named BOPE, a paramilitary division of the police force designed to operate in the treacherous environment of the favelas. Gunning down uzi-toting teenagers and roughing up low-level pot dealers grow tiresome quickly, so we halt the story’s progression to delve into tangental back stories. All the while, the kalaiedoscopic, frenetic editing combined with omnipresent voiceover, unneccessary freeze-frames, slang-filled dialogue, and casual violence consistently remind us of City of God, and, more to the point, how its style was unique before Tony Scott and others began to cannibalize it.

BOPE is led by Captain Nascimento, a repulsive power-tripping fascist tool with serious rage issues who is, annoyingly enough, our narrator. His fatalistic point of view is intriguing, for the first two minutes, before his obsession with rules and consequences becomes grating. Prolonged anti-drug messages verge on becoming didactic; one story involves Matias,  a young BOPE officer who must juggle a stressful job, a burgeoning relationship, and an oral presentation on Foucalt for Philosophy 101.  It would have been amusing if the group’d tackled something from his sexual studies, but no, we use the oh-so-controversial topic of police corruption to shoehorn in Important Social Commentary. Thrill as the group discusses judicial reform! Cling to the edge of your seat when Matias’ recently-met-cute girlfriend parries his right-wing ideology attack with nary a glance at her open Derrida text! When his study buddies bust out joints and proceed to pass around a lit roach, he politely refuses. “Matias should have arrested them, according to the law,” our narrator interjects in a hamhanded, propagandistic Reefer Madness style. “He was already getting soft.”

When psuedo-propaganda and makeout sessions set to REM’s “Shiny Happy People” fail to impress, we head on to scenes of strange black humor, such as criminals being enlisted to help dispose of corpses (so the cops can avoid paperwork) or a corrupt senior officer scamming gunrunners out of their latest shipment. When that doesn’t quite gel, we move on to extended boot camp sequences complete with name calling, excessive violence, and a graveyard where cowardly trainees bury their uniforms as part of their discharge procedure. Sure, we all like the first half of Full Metal Jacket, but none of the skills learned ever pay off. Surely there must have been a better way to show team solidarity than to have them consume a compatriot’s vomit, on orders from our sociopathic hero. At least 50% of Elite Squad consists of Nascimento being a complete asshole to everyone he sees. There are a couple of action sequences that are handled with considerable incompetence.

Nothing ever comes together in a satisfying way. After a trigger-happy BOPE Fiend is turned into swiss cheese by a random street gang, the final act turns into a simplistic, Bronson-esque revenge fantasy as our humble narrator dumps his prescribed MAOIs down the drain and proceeds to work his way up the chain of command, the usual 80s action style. It’s a very poor substitute for a plotline. Top it all off with Paul Greengrass Seizure-Cam to ensure no one vicariously enjoys the violence, or is even able to comprehend what is unfolding so loudly on screen. Elite Squad would not have made it through Basic, much less worked its way up to Elite status. It’s like watching someone trying to juggle 12 eggs at one time. They’ll catch a couple of them and the rest end up as an unholy mess. Padilha has shown great promise as a documentarian with his Bus 174, but in narrative form he’s a biter of the highest order.

Tags: BOPE, elite squad, Jose Padilha

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