Those who are familiar with the first part of this saga - the equally brilliant but shocking Elite Squad - will recall that the BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion), and its heroic crime-buster Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), were the good guys. But good guys are not very popular in a polluted world and in Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, they become besieged rivals.
It's a brutal and shocking delineation of militant dictatorship, and a hard core bloodbath filmed in a gritty documentary style to accentuate the raw realism and extreme brutality.
A unique aspect of this film (and its predecessor), is that the filmmakers have not exploited the subject matter. Although it is a film about violence and its effect on society, it's ultimately a story about the invisible people who become victims of the senseless warfare. Moura is particularly good as the family man who has to make dangerous decision to save or destroy the lives of friends and loved ones.
Having come from the documentary world, director José Padilha (who co-wrote the script with Bráulio Mantovani) and producer Marcos Prado achieved their goal in bringing as much realism to the screen as possible; a realism that we constantly see on the front pages of newspapers, or on television and reinforces the plausibility of the fictional reality.
Says Padilha: "I didn't try to simply produce pure entertainment. I tried to make a movie that doesn't make moral inferences for the spectator, that doesn't tell him what to think and when to think, and that doesn't contain deliberately constructed pauses to do so. I tried to make a movie that fights urban violence through its dramaturgy, and not with metaphors or intellectualised statements."
The first Elite Squad film was a hit in Brazil (1.2 million people saw it there), but barely made it to theatres internationally. Thanks to a leak of the finished film from a post-production house, the highly anticipated film hit the streets as a bootleg DVD. Additionally, fearing the impact of the film, the real life BOPE sued to stop the release, claiming that the film unfairly portrayed them as ultra-violent and lacking integrity. This put the filmmakers in a very difficult position, with piracy on one end and lawsuits on the other. Now South Africans and the world can see what most did not see. The significant and pertinent questions raised in the films are not just relevant in Rio, or Brazil, or South America. The ideas and questions raised are bigger than one country, and so, from an American perspective, one has to wonder what will happen if we ever have an American Captain Nascimento? And what would we think of him?
Rating 4/5
