ThiefHott Too much of everything

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Ian (Flash Review)This is a fairly typical film about power and corruption done properly and honestly in Rio de Janeiro. The head of the police force (I think) has to deal with a corrupt special unit who is pushing out and murdering drug gangs in order to profit from the citizens in many ways. Anyone to cross their path, bad or good better watch out. Once the protagonist learns what is happening he attempts to zero in and eradicate the immoral corruptors. Will he be successful or will he be another casualty in their bloodbath? The film is gritty and has many characters to sort out. This being a foreign film, I felt I was constantly reading subtitles and wasn't able to watch enough of the action as even when the characters weren't talking there was narration. Not a problem, just the way it is. Good acting, editing, pacing and it was good dialog so I was engaged throughout. Solid and bloody.

Leroy Wells I don't know where all the praise is coming from for this movie, this is literally one of the worst written movies I have ever seen and trust me the only reason I'm writing this review is because iv never been more fooled of time in my life. Literally a time wasting movie that I thought would at least have a good ending.Lets get one thing straight, this movie takes a whole 1 hour and 30 minutes building up to pretty much nothing. It just keeps building up momentum leading absolutely nowhere.SPOILERS ALERT! The end result is the last 20 minutes being your finale of revenge. You can say it wasn't much of a revenge and it was such a terrible revenge at that. How much the story was building up with those corrupt police officers ruining the system killing everyone while the good guys did nothing and killed no one. The script is bad, that's all there is to say. I found zero enjoyment and zero entertainment. Even Hollywood blockbusters are more entertaining, these reviews are absolutely garbage.

Joao Guilherme Araujo Schimidt Elite Squad is a movie about mafia and cops, but not just about it, the movie pass the good versus bad, is a sophisticate analysis of Brazilian society. Made with a strong social sense about politics and realistic habits, the history shows how compress is solve the corruption in Brazil. The main point is about two opposite men, Coronel Nascimento and congressman Diogo Fraga, Nascimento is head of elite squad BOPE, a no limit group of cops, and Fraga is human rights teacher. They are opposite in methodology, but achieve the same goal, destroy a systematic corruption of money and power. The movies exposure the corruption of police, NGO, Congress and everyone, the best point the movies shows is about how complex the system of corruption and power is, and how the status quo protect the bad guys from justice. Padilha, the director made a movie to show the obvious, but it is exactly why this is one of the best Brazilian movies about society.

MisterWhiplash It had been a while since I had seen Elite Squad part 1, and though the sort of hero of the story, Colonel Nascimento (Moura) is the same and some of the characters return for this story (such as Andre Matias, from the actor Andre Romero), one of the best things about it is that it can mostly be watched on its own terms. You can go straight into Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, and I'm not sure what you would miss from the first entry in the story. The difference I think here is that the focus is on the system at large, how the criminals in the gangs are just a small part of the picture of corruption that is drawn, and it involves representatives, the governor, so many people who make things tick the wrong ways.I think in my previous review of part 1 I said there was a run of "nihilistic nastiness", and also that there was no real enemy to the story. Maybe Padillha knew that as a storyteller and saw to make having some sort of person or people of conflict crucial to his film. In this story, which starts at one point and goes back four years to show how Nascimento goes from being the head of his BOP squad group to being promoted into the system - the surveillance and head of all the major officers in the city (he's not the only one in charge, and how he gets promoted comes from some controversy following a prison shoot-out which opens the movie) - we see how the system works and fails the people of the slums. A question is even asked near the end: why are there slums in the first place? Exploitation of the poor, sapping them of every dime possible more than anything. The film shows in its very harsh point of view that if you take out the drug dealers, it leaves fresh room for the corrupt cops.How corrupt? Well, they basically operate like another mafia (I love the little moment where the massive TV host cum representative questions how it can be a 'mafia' since that's Italy and people eat rice and beans in Brazil, as if the comparison makes sense), and what's fascinating and what I respect about the storytelling is how Padillha makes his hero always understanding of the world he's in, but until the third act he's a step or two behind. He gives the audience - he calls it as 'my friend' as if we are just one person at his long monologue - insight into what corrupt cops will do to a place like the sums of Rio (there's two, one of which sort of takes Nascimento's place in the BOP, and they're both genre character-types you've seen before, but in an entertaining way). Oh, and there's a person who is in the sort of gray area, Diogo Fraga (probably my favorite performance of the lot, Irandihir Santos), who is steadfastly for human rights and exposing the truth and is somehow now married to Nascimento's ex-wife, and what if he is one of these too-soft liberals that mucks up Nascimento's strategies to wipe out the gangs? I like the characters and the story itself so much, how the filmmakers really dig deep into how systematic the corruption gets but to that point where people almost don't notice it at times or care, or they get indignant when things like the truth comes up (sort of like The Wire but in Brazil, in a way), but I wish that some of the storytelling choices were better. Like the first movie, and of course by its main antecedent City of God, it's loaded with wall-to-wall narration from the protagonist. Some of it is useful to know, but a lot of it isn't, and there are times (I'd say the split is 30% useful and 70% not) when the filmmakers dropped the voice-over so that we (or I) could get involved in the action more, or something as simple as a character walking into a building or a place. It sinks the movie down to points that are not helpful to the narrative, even as this is the sort of 'best' man, our guide through this world.There's also a sub-plot with the Nascimento's son and ex-wife, and some melodrama there, which is fine but not as strong as the main story lines. But ultimately what helps make Elite Squad 2 memorable the most is the momentum it builds in the final 30 minutes, when s*** really starts to hit the fan for all the characters and people start to make their power plays - will it simply involve guns and wiping people out (to the point where, as with one character, it's where a person gets charred down to the skeleton with teeth pulled out), or more cleverly, sticking it out in the public for all to see. It's an intense wrap-up to what is an otherwise good if not great crime saga.