Rating of
3/4
"Elite Squad: The Enemy Within" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 09/15/12
Captain Nasciento is promoted to the Intelligence Agency and uses his BOPE units to clear the drug trade out of the city, unwittingly allowing the corrupt militia to fill the empty criminal power vacuum. Jose Padilha's sequel to the entertaining if morally dubious Elite Squad is a similar expose of the crime and corruption of modern day Rio de Janeiro, peppered with some brutal action sequences and coloured with nothing but various shades of morally ambiguous grey. Padilha's script is actually rather more nuanced than that of the first film, which tempers the fascistic overtones as Nasciento comes to find common ground with the lily-livered liberal Fraga when he realises that they both want the same thing; justice. It also attempts to address the corruption of the system beyond the streets showing the self serving politicians pulling the strings and their manipulation of the media. It's essentially a visceral tirade against institutional corruption and as such seems a little preachy, especially since the first person narrative makes it feel rather dry and detached. The action scenes are brilliantly executed however and the multi-layered story gives it a depth missing from the original film making for a quality action thriller with a political spin.
