Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010)

Very disappointing...

Absolutely Fantastic

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The movie Elite Squad was a very captivating movie with a ton of corruption and action. There were a lot of interesting twists and turns that kept me very interested. It had a strong American type of movie vibe to it. I think it was a very interesting representation of the police force in Brazil and showed the true possibility of corruptness within a government or a police force. It was also interesting to compare it to the other foreign films that I have seen in my Global Perspectives class in the aspect that there was actually wealth. There were both sides of the spectrum instead of just the poor side of the equation. I think that was what was making seem very American to me. But the plot itself was very intriguing and the twists along the way kept the movie alive and surprising which I really liked. I would definitely recommend it and overall was a very great movie.

Robert Nascimento is back, and he has been promoted. Now a Lieutenant Colonel in the police his career is jeopardised by slanderous accusations. He is reassigned to working with state security. Now he has to deal with the worst types of criminals - politicians.The first Elite Squad movie was great, and this is just as good. Interesting, compelling and gritty. Good action and drama, and it all happens at a cracking pace. However, the ending is a bit rushed and contrived.Good performances all round, especially from Wagner Moura in the lead role.

It had been a while since I had seen Elite Squad part 1, and though the sort of hero of the story, Colonel Nascimento (Moura) is the same and some of the characters return for this story (such as Andre Matias, from the actor Andre Romero), one of the best things about it is that it can mostly be watched on its own terms. You can go straight into Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, and I'm not sure what you would miss from the first entry in the story. The difference I think here is that the focus is on the system at large, how the criminals in the gangs are just a small part of the picture of corruption that is drawn, and it involves representatives, the governor, so many people who make things tick the wrong ways.I think in my previous review of part 1 I said there was a run of "nihilistic nastiness", and also that there was no real enemy to the story. Maybe Padillha knew that as a storyteller and saw to make having some sort of person or people of conflict crucial to his film. In this story, which starts at one point and goes back four years to show how Nascimento goes from being the head of his BOP squad group to being promoted into the system - the surveillance and head of all the major officers in the city (he's not the only one in charge, and how he gets promoted comes from some controversy following a prison shoot-out which opens the movie) - we see how the system works and fails the people of the slums. A question is even asked near the end: why are there slums in the first place? Exploitation of the poor, sapping them of every dime possible more than anything. The film shows in its very harsh point of view that if you take out the drug dealers, it leaves fresh room for the corrupt cops.How corrupt? Well, they basically operate like another mafia (I love the little moment where the massive TV host cum representative questions how it can be a 'mafia' since that's Italy and people eat rice and beans in Brazil, as if the comparison makes sense), and what's fascinating and what I respect about the storytelling is how Padillha makes his hero always understanding of the world he's in, but until the third act he's a step or two behind. He gives the audience - he calls it as 'my friend' as if we are just one person at his long monologue - insight into what corrupt cops will do to a place like the sums of Rio (there's two, one of which sort of takes Nascimento's place in the BOP, and they're both genre character-types you've seen before, but in an entertaining way). Oh, and there's a person who is in the sort of gray area, Diogo Fraga (probably my favorite performance of the lot, Irandihir Santos), who is steadfastly for human rights and exposing the truth and is somehow now married to Nascimento's ex-wife, and what if he is one of these too-soft liberals that mucks up Nascimento's strategies to wipe out the gangs? I like the characters and the story itself so much, how the filmmakers really dig deep into how systematic the corruption gets but to that point where people almost don't notice it at times or care, or they get indignant when things like the truth comes up (sort of like The Wire but in Brazil, in a way), but I wish that some of the storytelling choices were better. Like the first movie, and of course by its main antecedent City of God, it's loaded with wall-to-wall narration from the protagonist. Some of it is useful to know, but a lot of it isn't, and there are times (I'd say the split is 30% useful and 70% not) when the filmmakers dropped the voice-over so that we (or I) could get involved in the action more, or something as simple as a character walking into a building or a place. It sinks the movie down to points that are not helpful to the narrative, even as this is the sort of 'best' man, our guide through this world.There's also a sub-plot with the Nascimento's son and ex-wife, and some melodrama there, which is fine but not as strong as the main story lines. But ultimately what helps make Elite Squad 2 memorable the most is the momentum it builds in the final 30 minutes, when s*** really starts to hit the fan for all the characters and people start to make their power plays - will it simply involve guns and wiping people out (to the point where, as with one character, it's where a person gets charred down to the skeleton with teeth pulled out), or more cleverly, sticking it out in the public for all to see. It's an intense wrap-up to what is an otherwise good if not great crime saga.

Padilha's work on this movie is incredible not only because he produced a movie with Hollywood's top notch-quality, but also because we succeed in capturing Brazil's social reality so well.I've watched this movie more that 15 times (the first I was on a movie theater so full people were literally sitting on the stairs) and I can say for sure that it is a very complex, detailed and well thought story, bringing in one single piece all the dynamics that work into Rio de Janeiro's political scene.All the action scenes are very very real and so goddamn exciting; one particular is so vivid that I just put it on replay in your mind after you watch it. It's the best movie I've ever seen.