Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad)

First of all, I should say that I don't think this film was intended for me. Rather, its target audience is what I like to call the "definite fanboy": young male with a strong liking for films like 'Fight Club', 'The Matrix' and well..., you get the idea. The set up of the plot is Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) wants to leave his position at the BOPE (a special military police in Rio) because of work-related stress but he first needs to find himself a replacement. The first half of the film focuses more on showing the situation with the favelas (slums), the corruption of the regular police and is basically trying to demonstrate how the system works. The second part, however, is more about the BOPE's boot camp and the training and searching for a decent candidate for Captain Nascimento's replacement.


The film is all seen through Captain Nascimento's eyes whose narration throughout the film is sometimes informative, sometimes overbearing and mostly just unnecessary. He is a bitter man, a thoroughly one-dimensional character, a "hero" Rambo style. The film presents him and the BOPE's "violence is the only way to combat violence" tactics as the only possible solution to the problem of the favelas. Others may argue that the film was just trying to portray a reality, the reality in Rio, but the truth of the matter is that that alleged "reality" was disgustingly imbued with the director's personal political stances, who exalts the BOPE's methods to the max. This is achieved by a series of camera angles, camera movements and different combinations of music all of which combine to give the film that sense of glorification. Perhaps this was not the director's intention, but if it wasn't, then he is a complete hack with no knowledge whatsoever of the filmmaking art. He could have escaped this obvious bias had he shown the other side of the spectrum, but the screenplay thoroughly lets him down.

Indeed, the screenplay is, without a doubt, the worst part of the film. The dialogues are mostly superficial and add next to nothing to the story, in fact, they only serve to enhance the one side of the one-dimensional characters. Not even the two leading characters get any background to their story. Captain Nascimento, as I mentioned before, is a bitter, extremely violent man, all probably as a result of work-related stress. He is married and has a child during the course of the film, and yet he's still always seen as an authoritative, aggressive person, even among his family. The other important character is the man who's to be his replacement. André Matias (André Ramiro) is without a doubt the character with most depth to him, but that's not saying much. He's the reflective, passive and intelligent man who is torn between being a lawyer and being a law-enforcement man. He does both things, until one, predictably prevails over the other. Moreover, there is no room for women in this film. There are a couple of extremely poor female characters, but the only one worth mentioning is a fellow law student, Matias's love interest and active member of an NGO aimed at aiding people in the favelas, played nicely by Fernanda Machado. She was a character with potential, but again..., the screenplay lets her down. The performances are what one would expect out of the terrible script: superficial, simply lacking in any kind of depth.

All these flaws aside, the film was not unwatchable for me. It is quite entertaining (for the wrong reasons, but who cares?) and its quick-paced editing make the two hours fly by. It is a complete hack job in every possible way, but it works as a pseudo-intellectual, extremely violent, action film which (if it hasn't already) will find its niche in the movie-watching public.

Personal rating: 4/10