Elite Squad

Wagner Moura in Elite Squad

Jose Padilha's Elite Squad, from 2007, is crime drama set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro in 1997. Wagner Moura plays Captain Nascimento, the leader of an elite SWAT unit called upon to battle the militias of drug lords when the local police are overmatched. His narration holds together the often scrambled narrative. His wife is urging him to leave the force and escape the stress that is weighing upon him. He promises her he will, but not until he finds a replacement for himself. The first half of the film features the back story of two rookie cops, Matias and Neto, whose lives intersect with Nascimento. The Captain sees potential in the two rookies and recruits them to his unit. The second half of the film begins with a boot camp segment that makes the one in Full Metal Jacket look like a Sunday School picnic. After surviving this ordeal, Matias and Neto join the unit for Operation Holiness, an effort to clean up the slums before the visit of Pope John Paul II.

Things go rather badly. Padilha portrays the police as institutionally corrupt, no different, in essence, than the drug lords . Neto, who is also studying to be a lawyer, is assigned a report on Foucault which rather baldly highlights the theme of "perverse institutions". Padilha even opens the film with a quote from Stanley Milgram stressing the limits of free will in a deterministic world.

The film was a huge hit in Brazil and spawned a sequel. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin and has achieved cult status. Moura is superb and the actors who portray Matias and Neto are also effective. The intricately constructed script is the main attribute of the film. However, Padilha's directorial technique brings mixed results at best. He goes for a hand held cinema verite style that does give the film some immediacy, but, also, a lack of coherence. The camera ping pongs back and forth between talking heads with whip pans that almost made me seasick. Without Nascimento's narration, the film verges on incomprehensibility.

The success of Elite Squad proved a boon to both Padilha and Moura. The pair reunited for Narcos in which Moura played Pablo Escobar. Elite Squad is a scathing look at the drug war, but it suffers from Padilha's inexperience as a director.