Elite Squad

So Rio de Janeiro is getting the 2016 summer Olympics. Brazil will be the first South American country to host the games.  Good for them.  So it looks like the BOPE squad has a couple of years to clean up the city.

Elite Squad is a Brazilian movie about a special unit of police called BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais which translates to Special Police Operations Battalion) that gets called in whenever it gets too hairy for the regular cops.  This force really exists in Rio and the film was based on a book of the same title by two former BOPE officers.

The story is about Captain Nascimento who has been with BOPE for ten years.  He’s starting to get the shakes and shortness of breath because the job is taking its toll.  He constantly has to go into the slums where it’s incredibly dangerous and interrogate scumbags and kill people ‘n shit.  Nascimento needs to find a replacement but it can’t just be anyone.  He needs to hand pick a guy that is as cutthroat and driven as he is.

It comes down to two candidates, Neto and Matias.  These two are almost opposites.  Neto goes after people impulsively without thinking.  Matias is very intellectual and waits before acting.  They are best friends and are both cops.  They have just joined the force but see very quickly that a lot of their superiors are corrupt.  They run all kinds of scams and get paid off by drug lords.  So through a series of occurrences Neto and Matias decide to try out for BOPE because BOPE is not corrupt.  BOPE is a killing machine.

The training camp is the best part of the movie.  It reminded me of the boot camp part of Full Metal Jacket because they’re yelling at them that they’re worthless and that they should quit.  They really put them through hell.  There’s a great scene where Matias falls asleep during a lecture and Nascimento hands him a grenade and pulls out the pin.  Then he yells at Matias that he’ll blow everyone up if he doesn’t stay awake.  Also whenever someone quits they make them dig a mock grave like they’re soul has died.

But really the training camp is not a huge part of the movie.  Most of the movie is about what Neto and Matias do before they join BOPE and about what Nascimento does in BOPE.  They do some fucked up shit too like put a plastic bag over people’s heads to get them to talk and shoot them in the leg.  They even sneak up on people and kill them.  These guys don’t have any mercy.

Nascimento narrates the movie and I love the way he talks about BOPE like it’s the baddest motherfuckin’ faction that ever existed.  He says things like "Matias was out for more than revenge, he was becoming a real BOPE officer".  He also tells us how fucked up the cops are in Rio and that either you become corrupt, you keep your mouth shut or you go to war.  He chose war.

The movie is shot in that typical journalistic style you see nowadays.  It’s not that confusing to follow but I had just a little bit of trouble reading the subtitles.  Now I have no problem with subtitles and in fact feel like I never miss a beat but they talk a lot and pretty fast in this piece so the subtitles fly by quick.  But it’s a minor grievance.

This movie is similar in style and tone to City of God (it's the same screenwriter) so if you liked that then you’ll like this.  Both movies don’t show Rio in a very good light and I wonder if it’s really that bad there or if it’s just a movie being a movie.  Either way Elite Squad is a pretty badass film.