Review of Elite Squad (2007)
Seen in 2024.
A captain in BOPE, Rio de Janeiro’s militarized special police force, tries to find his own replacement among the year’s new recruits, before he becomes a father and/or suffers a nervous breakdown from the stress of torturing and killing the city’s drug dealers amid a complacent population, a corrupt police force, high humidity, and preparations to receive the Pope.
I saw this movie on the personal recommendation of multiple Brazilian colleagues. It’s charming, but mainly because it’s a mess. It’s cheaply shot, with high contrasts and oversaturated colours to occupy the senses. The hand-held camera often catches some funny detail in the split second before or after an inexpert cut, such as when the corrupt Captain Fabio points to his rival, Captain Oliveira, in a strip club, and the camera refocuses to reveal, just for a moment, that Oliveira’s lieutenant is busy necking with a prostitute in the habit of a nun. The larger-scale composition is nonsensical: A 50-minute flashback, a training sequence, a brief climax, and then it’s over. The Pope does arrive, but he’s oversold, like most of the other plot elements. Pretty girls and gobs of shrimp provide the sensual pleasures in this South American Scarface (1983), but mostly, it’s about violence.
Elite Squad is a fantasy about toxic masculinity as an overall moral good in human society. In the deliberately warped context of this fantasy, torture and violence are disgusting but exciting, and therefore positively charged. The filmmakers are not naïve enough to romanticize violence without showing any of its drawbacks, but for the antagonist, Captain Nascimento, the main drawback is estrangement from his wife. For the deuteragonist, Matias, the price for heroic toughness is similarly his relationship with his fellow student, Maria; a relationship he ends by illegally assaulting another fellow student. In Nascimento’s opinion, Matias should have ended it sooner. The unspoken message of the film is the one that Rodrigo Duterte, in reality, would soon apply to Davao City, and then to the Philippines at large: The best way to reduce crime is to fire at will. It is a stupid message.
The many scenes of complacency, on both sides of the law, are more interesting than the violence. Those seem to come from experience, not from fantasy. Elite Squad would have been more aesthetically pleasing if it had stayed with Neto and the auto mechanics, treating problems of corruption with humour, vivacity, grime and sweat.