Elite Squad: The Enemy Within | Film review

Brazilian director José Padilha’s follow-up to his controversial Elite Squad—a surprising choice for the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2008—is, at the very least, less ideologically offensive than its predecessor. That movie ended with a revenge killing in which a villain was gunned down at close range, a moment that felt borrowed from a Stallone action flick. Dialing down the shrillness, the new film implicitly functions as auto-critique. (It’s helpful, though not necessary, to have seen the original.) The hero Nascimento (Moura), who commands Rio’s special paramilitary police unit, is demoted following a botched operation. Dispatched to a government surveillance job, he uncovers a black market of powerful politicians and corrupt cops involved in assassinations, drug running and sex trafficking.

Moura is a hypnotic presence, and he holds this overplotted sequel’s disparate parts together. The film is marred by Padilha’s impulse to make the action personal; a strand involving Nascimento’s son and ex-wife falls flat. Like the first film, The Enemy Within deploys a stream-of-consciousness narration that proves alternately alienating and perversely gripping, and Padilha and cinematographer Lula Carvalho use the vertical construction of the impoverished, drug-ravaged favelas to mesmerizing effect. Still, the movie never reaches the lyrical, profound sadness of the director’s remarkable 2002 documentary, Bus 174.