Elite Squad.

"As ambiguous in its accused fascist leanings as the original Dirty Harry - and yet as reflective of its homeland's domestic turmoil as America's cop dramas and Italy's poliziotteschi were in the 1970s - this latest pounding slice-of-thug-life thriller from Brazil packs the same cinematic firepower as City of God, only on the other side of the law," writes Jim Ridey in the Voice.

"Rather than interrogatory, Elite Squad is merely loud - it revels in its straw-man trustafarians, and lingers, in the guise of revelation, on underworld brutality and BOPE's badass full metal jacketed basic training," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine. "Neither particularly fascist nor conscientious, Elite Squad is simply an audition tape, its 'urgency' piggybacked on a nation's abjection."

Updated through 9/19.

"[I]t bears a resemblance to viscerally exciting 70s urban thrillers like The French Connection, in which only the fascists could do what needed to be done," notes David Edelstein in New York. "[Director José] Padilha builds in checks and balances, scenes in which BOPE's bloodshed is genuinely disgusting. But he reserves his true loathing for the lefty college kids who denounce cops while smoking (and dealing) dope - unconcerned with the blood shed for their high. This makes criticizing the film's politics harder, because you don't want to sound like the creeps."

"Eloquent takes on Brazilian crime don't get much better than last year's pitch-perfect documentary, Manda Bala, which does a sensational job of placing blame on the country's government (although it exclusively focuses on kidnapping)," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Less organized, Elite Squad nevertheless succeeds at putting the worst of the violent spectacles on screen, primarily through a series of nicely staged shootouts and torture sequences."

"[J]ust how realistic are these films' portrayal of life in the notorious Brazilian slums? Is it all gun-toting teenagers on glamorous hill-side backdrops?" A scorecard from David Tryhorn in the Guardian.

Updates, 9/19: "In classic exploitation flick fashion, Elite Squad, a relentlessly ugly, unpleasant, often incoherent assault on the senses from Brazil - and the baffling winner of this year's top prize at the Berlin Film Festival - wants to have its grinding violence and sanctimony too," writes Manohla Dargis, who summarizes the plot in the New York Times, before wrapping up with: "Bloody torture and bloodier death from cops and thugs ensue amid smeary, jittery camerawork and choppy edits that transform the visually disjointed, grim and dim spaces into confetti. Somewhere, Roger Corman is weeping."

"Though shot through with state-of-the-art, smash-and-grab camera pyrotechnics, pulsing music, and gangsta histrionics, Elite Squad is, at heart, a throwback to the kinds of cop-and-cowboy movies that American film producers seem to have given up on making in Hollywood," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Like Ricky Tognazzi's similarly lean and stealthily retro 1993 Sicilian cop drama La Scorta, Elite Squad moves on its characters' adrenaline, not on the dubious artificial energy of the digital explosions, close-ups of cell phones and computer screens, and gravity-defying action set pieces that continue to elicit yawns in most Yankee cop movies."

"Does it create a moral stalemate to provide a sociological context for such desperate draconian measures, while simultaneously turning torture tactics into rush-ready sensationalism?" asks David Fear in Time Out New York. "Once the secondhand high of watching these psychos protect and serve wears off, you won't be any closer to an answer, either."

"The film itself doesn't do the glorifying; it's those that the film depicts that do, those who do so in order to survive in an extremely harsh and forbidding environment," writes Nick Plowman. The film is "all brawn, little brain and audaciously entertaining on the most mediocre level there is."

Online viewing tip. Padilha @ Tribeca.

Posted by dwhudson at September 18, 2008 8:08 AM