"In classic exploitation flick fashion, “Elite Squad,” a relentlessly ugly, unpleasant, often incoherent assault on the senses from Brazil — and the baffling winner of this year’s top prize at the Berlin Film Festival — wants to have its grinding violence and sanctimony too. The director is the promising José Padilha, here belly-flopping into fiction after soaring high in “Bus 174,” the powerful 2002 documentary he made with Felipe Lacerda about a desperate hijacking by a Rio slum dweller. Clearly taken with the lower depths, Mr. Padilha has returned to Rio’s homegrown war zones, this time armed with a screenplay he wrote with Rodrigo Pimentel and Bráulio Mantovani, the author of “City of God,” the art-house-meets-grindhouse hit that clearly inspired this one.
The narrator, Nascimento (Wagner Moura), a captain in the special, black-shirted Rio police unit, is so close to the edge that he can’t stop his hands from shaking, fists from flying or mouth from flapping. Anxious to leave the elite squad, this dully repetitive if uninformative guide goes about trying to find a successor, a chore that soon involves a couple of rookies (André Ramiro and Caio Junqueira), both of whom have to be broken down before they can join up. Meanwhile, the pope is swinging into town, which means the captain must help sweep the slum. Bloody torture and bloodier death from cops and thugs ensue amid smeary, jittery camerawork and choppy edits that transform the visually disjointed, grim and dim spaces into confetti. Somewhere, Roger Corman is weeping.
“Elite Squad” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for ultraviolence."
Fonte: New York Times, por Manohla Dargis.
Manohla disse, tá falado.
A crítica gringa
Além de criticar a edição do filme, dizer que é um filme de exploração e chamá-lo de “feio” e “incoerente”, a bam-bam-bam do New York Times ainda cita o rei dos filmes B, Roger Corman (que além de ser o maior diretor de clássicos “B” como “Frankenstein Unbound”, ainda atuou “no estilo Hitchcock" em filmes como “The Silence of the Lambs” e na segunda parte de “The Godfather”) dizendo que “em algum lugar, ele deve estar chorando”.
Ficadica pro José Padilha, pra próxima vez, fazer um filme usando o Iraque como cenário com um capitão Nacimento texano (aposto que ela irá achar tu-do!). Ou, quem sabe, pedir uma ponta num próximo filme do Meirelles.
Enquanto isso, Padilha, brincando com seu ursinho de ouro em casa, pensa: “On the pope's account, buffoon! Rá!”
