MasterChugs Theater: ‘Elite Squad: The Enemy Within’

Chugs is currently busy being besieged by a gigantic amount of work at his job, along with training people to eventually replace him. It’s that time of the season again. As such, with both the heat on the rise and the rain coming down in droves, why don’t you sit in and catch an easily seen flick?

Or go out this weekend and see Prometheus. I know damn well I’m going to.

Writer-director Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a follow-up to the original Elite Squad, but not to worry. No previous courses are required, as this latest (Brazil’s official selection for a 2012 Oscar nomination) is essentially a standalone, and a sturdy one at that.

The film, set 13 years after the first Elite Squad, follows Wagner Moura as a lieutenant colonel whose dour demeanor is balanced by a wry, hard-ass voiceover. Though he spent the first film searching for and finding a successor to head up BOPE, the sequel finds Moura back on the squad. His marriage is over, and his adolescent son is learning to dislike his father’s violent ways, thanks to his new step-dad, left-leaning civil-rights advocate Irandhir Santos. Moura and Santos are placed at odds when a prison riot goes bloodily wrong, but the people are so supportive of the former’s slaughter of a rampaging drug gang that he’s promoted up and out of his depth to Sub-Secretary Of Intelligence, overseeing wiretaps as well as his beloved BOPE, and discovering that politicians may be worse than cartel heads.

Padiha, who has already been tapped to reboot RoboCop, brings the same level of breathless energy that he exhibited in the first film, to the sequel. Things always seem to be moving, and even in quieter moments, like a ranting politician on a Bill O’Reilly-style television show, the air seems to hum with electricity. His camera never stays still, almost always at the same eye level as the characters, so we tense up as they round that dingy narrow alleyway and brace ourselves as bullets rocket in our direction.

Padiha has added some stylistic flourishes into the mix too, like an opening scene where Nascimento’s tiny car is shredded with ammo, the camera slowing down to lend the moment the air of operatic grandeur as we watch the rounds as they tear apart the vehicle. The violence’s brutality has real consequences and feels appropriately grave; it stings. The film chose to wisely expand its scope while also zeroing in on our hero and his family, so that the threat is real, palpable and personal.

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within aims to be more than just some action movie, even if it is an action movie with a potential Best Foreign Language Feature nomination pedigree. It looks to be about what causes the violence and unrest in these communities – the power of the people pulling the strings and the unending cycle of corruption that, as the movie comes to a close, keeps on chugging. On this front, it mostly succeeds. Knee-jerk reactions may make you think that the film is championing a response to crime that borders on fascism, but that really doesn’t seem to be the case to me. Though putting on dazzling display of technical proficiency, the movie’s heart is as big as an armored truck.