Viking Night: Elite Squad 2
By Bruce Hall
March 27, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Well if that's your attitude, Elite Squad 2 doesn't need you. It doesn't have time for you. It laughs at your weakness, mocks your confusion and someday it will happily spit on your grave. It will steal your girlfriend, wreck your car, spend your money, drink all your beer, and put its feet on your furniture. It will do all these things, and you will like it. This is because Elite Squad 2 has indeed become legend, and for good reason. Movie geeks far and wide have been singing its praises all year long and I admit; I was afraid to see it. I just...wasn't sure what it would do to me.
Well, I was right to be afraid.
Truly, who among us can say they are prepared for this level of unadulterated, brain melting, gut punching awesomeness? Watching Elite Squad 2 is like getting blasted in the face with a commercial sandblaster at a Metallica concert while ninjas break white pine boards across your back. Watching Elite Squad 2 is like filling a turkey baster with scotch and Tabasco sauce and injecting it into your eyeball while a Marine drill sergeant screams obscenities at you. It will kick your ass. It will put hair on your chest, and then it will put hair on that hair. It is nothing less than the most bone crushing, flesh searingly wicked police drama released in years.
Bold statements? Yes. True statements? Hell yes.
As you can guess from the title, Elite Squad 2 is a sequel, and the director of both films has since been tapped to helm the reboot of Robocop. I'll tell you now, I was rather tepid on the idea of another Robocop until I saw Elite Squad 2. Then, I just assumed that Robocop was the guy who made it. In reality, Brazilian filmmaker Jose Padilha is not a cyborg, although I'm pretty sure parts of him are made from massive chunks of gleaming steel. Here, Padilha continues the story he began with 2007's Elite Squad. Police Captain Roberto Nascimento (Wagner Moura) and his friend Matias were bright, idealistic young cops in Rio De Janiero's military police force who join BOPE, the elite crime fighting unit tasked with taking on the city's drug lords.
Thirteen years later, Nascimento is head of the unit and Matias (Andre Ramiro) is his right hand man. They're both a little less young and a little less idealistic. The city is still routinely rocked by drug violence, and the government and police are riddled with the sort of cancerous corruption that makes it hard for BOPE to fight the good fight. Nascimento and his boys are understaffed and underfunded, but they bust ass and get results. This creates problems for the state Governor, who is in the pocket of the local militia, along with most of the city police. They want Nascimento gone, and they get their chance when a riot breaks out at Brazil's most infamous penitentiary. BOPE responds, but not before prominent civil rights activist Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos) shows up.
Fraga is the sort of bleeding heart who believes criminals need hugs, not head shots. He shows up ready to hold hands with the prisoners and help them negotiate with police. Nascimento agrees, and BOPE shows up to negotiate - with hot lead. Mathias and his men kick down the doors, shoot everyone in the face, drop the mic and leave. Riot over. Humiliated, Fraga takes to the airwaves and accuses the police of murder. This is the opportunity the Government needs to get rid of Nascimento, but they can't fire him. The crime weary public is 100 percent okay with a couple dozen drug lords getting ventilated; they consider BOPE heroes. So, the Governor kicks Nascimento upstairs, making him head of intelligence. A cushy desk job and a nice bump in pay should take the fight out of anyone, right?
Not so much.
Using his new found power, Nascimento gives BOPE more money, more equipment and more power. I think he even gives them steroids and raw meat. They sweep through Rio like a steaming wave of hot murder, bringing the drug syndicate to its knees. Problem is, with the crime lords no longer running the city, dirty cops move in to take over. And some of them turn out to be old friends. Things are worse than ever, and Nascimento finds himself having to fight the same battle all over again - except this time the enemy is...wait for it...WITHIN.
Oh, and did I mention that Fraga is shacked up with Nascimento's ex wife and teenage son? His leftist rants have left them both afraid of the man they once called husband and father; both are now pawns in a political tug of war between two enemies who seek the same goal through opposing methods. Alliances are made, and then broken. Friends become enemies, and enemies become friends. Lines begin to blur between what's political and what's practical. And, how do you solve a problem when everyone who has the power to solve it benefits from leaving things the way they are?
Without a doubt, Elite Squad 2 is full of enough twists, turns and narrative intrigue for two or three films. On top of that, it offers up generous helpings of car chases, gunplay, Brazilian girls in bikinis, torture, screaming matches, blood, sweat and tears. But none of it feels forced, contrived or gratuitous. There's plenty of shocking violence but Padilha's direction is so restrained that it never feels out of context. Brazilian drug lords are not nice people. They roll hard and to destroy them, the police are gonna have to jack some people up.
Like it or not this is a dirty business, conducted in the dirty kind of world that tends to soil everything and everyone in it. Money and power are strong motivators, and not everyone is made of the same moral fiber. One man will gladly risk his life for an ideal, while another will happily strike a deal with evil to maintain the status quo. Welcome to Brazil.
Now, certain earmarks of Brazilian culture may at first seem inaccessible to American audiences - do we have entire cities run by drug cartels and dirty cops? I guess that depends on where you live, and whom you ask. But the appropriate ratio of liberty versus security is a question that every democracy grapples with, sooner or later. When the very fabric of your society is threatened, how far are we willing to take the fight? When the enemy takes it to the ground, are we willing to go there? When everyone's covered in shit, it's hard to tell one side from the other and in a free society, everyone's got an opinion on that. Throw in the 24 hour news cycle and its screaming cadre of talking heads and know-it-alls, and you've got yourself one hell of a story.
This, my friends, is Elite Squad 2. It asks hard questions and makes no compromises. It makes you think, and it also makes you want to get in your car and drive really fast until someone forces you to stop. It's visually striking. It's got mass. It's got energy. It's got a thumping hip hop soundtrack (some languages lend themselves better to rap than English; Portuguese is one of them). Seriously, this is the movie Michael Mann would make if Michael Mann were still MAKING Michael Mann movies. Simply put - Elite Squad 2 makes sweet love to all other cop movies, and then forces them to make sandwiches and wash dishes.
Yes, it has flaws. The level of grit will not be for everyone. There's less graphic violence in this movie than there SEEMS to be, but at times the film merely hints at horrors that are not shown on screen, and the image in your mind is more horrifying than what any visual effect could convey. Unless you can understand Portuguese, you're going to have to read a lot of subtitles. But, considering how many of us used to do our homework in front of the television, I've never bought into the intellectually lazy excuse that it's impossible to watch a movie and read subtitles simultaneously.
Nascimento and Fraga are not quite caricatures, but their uncompromising nature falls just short of a video game avatar. To some degree this is necessary, as I see both characters as being somewhat symbolic in nature. We all want criminals to pay - but do we really want to lose our humanity in the process of punishing them? Nascimento and Fraga represent opposing ends of this ideological spectrum, but they're both after the same thing - justice. There's always a middle ground, and at the end of the day that's what this movie is about - finding that ground.
While, of course, kicking you in the face with a steel toed combat boot.