jrice73

Thought provoking, highly charged, and just about damn near pitch perfect, Elite Squad is a document about what goes on day in, day out in the "war" between the elite BOPE forces and the drug cartels, dealers,and dare I say, addicts within the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. BOPE are the elite, tactical unit of Rio's police department. Highly militaristic, highly trained, and highly duty bound, the BOPE share much in common with the most elite counter insurgency or counter terrorism special forces units in the world such as the US Navy SEALs, the British SAS or the German GSG9. But what separates BOPE from these units, is that BOPE is the police, not the military. And this raises all kinds of flags. You see, BOPE's ends may be just, but their means are absolutely ruthless. Throw your Miranda Rights out the window kids, they DO NOT exist in Brazil. BOPE will shoot first and NEVER ask questions. They will torture to get information and then swoop down like ninja packing state of the art firepower and overwhelm their enemies, the drug gangs of the Rio slums. And they will do so without any apparent oversight.

Who do the BOPE commanders report to? We don't know. We see BOPE through the eyes of Captain Nascimento. The good captain believes that everything around not BOPE is utterly corrupt and beyond redemption. That includes other cops that are not BOPE, the gangs, the addicts, and the government. But what's interesting is that Nascimento wants out. He's seen enough. Apparently he's got too much blood on his hands. Or maybe its the fact that his wife is pregnant with their first child, a son. Whatever the reason, Nascimento is deeply troubled as he goes into battle fighting back the shakes, fighting back what is apparently PTSD. He can't bring himself to tell the psychiatrist that he's seeing what's really troubling him. Nascimento though figures he'll have to get himself a replacement so he can get transferred out of front line duty. Well, his replacement candidates are a couple of young rookies from the local PD, Neto and Matias. Both are eager and have not yet been tainted by the lure of corruption in the service. The film paints a portrait of a police force where cops screw each other over for bribes and territory all the while consorting with the drug gangs (the very enemy of the BOPE) and shaking down the citizenry for protection money. Neto and Matias want to do the right thing and be model police officers but that isn't going to happen unless they get away from the cops around them. So Nascimento, after rescuing them from a shoot out between the cops and gangs (and other cops), selects them for BOPE training. Both go through the HELL of training and these sequences rival what you've seen on the Discovery Channel of soldiers trying to make elite military units like the SEALs. Matias is also trying to get his law degree and make something of himself outside the police force. He falls in with the wrong crowd though--a bunch of rich college kids who use drugs and consort with the gangs and their bosses. You know this is going to have a bad ending. And it does. But not in the way you expect.

The telling thing here is that Matias' friends are all part of the problem. They hate the cops and the BOPE especially but they are all breaking the law one way or another and supporting the very dilemma that plagues Brazil and every other country--illicit drugs. Yet, they don't think twice about the corruption around them or the cops who try to keep the city safe. It's a dangerous combination. They need the police and the government to ultimately keep their lifestyles going. Crazy, isn't it. That's what's so fantastic about this film. This isn't a Hollywood cops and robbers blockbuster or a buddy cop movie. This is a police procedural which shows you how things happen in the real world, for better or for worse. Definitely, for the worse. BOPE is nothing more than a death squad. Nascimento is a father figure to his sons, Matias and Neto, pointing them in the right direction to become like the predator he is. Nascimento believes in the law more than anything. He's moral and upright, yet at what cost? Certainly he is no hero gunning down teenagers and torturing women all in the name of justice. He's a wolf, like the other BOPE soldiers, and everyone else are sheep. The wolves hunt and kill with impunity. That's what they do. I was thinking about Mamoru Oshii's award winning anime, Jin-Roh, while I was watching Elite Squad. Oshii's Kerberos Panzer Cops are like the BOPE, elite law enforcement officers who go around handing out justice at all costs. But Oshii pointed out that once a man becomes a wolf what becomes of his humanity? He sheds it of course,like hair. The BOPE are a dehumanizing death machine when its all said and done blowing away bad guys in a broken, busted world. And that isn't something you're comfortable with as you watch this film.

Mega Piranha is on, right now on the SciFi Channel (I refuse to call that channel what its actually been renamed; that's just bloody stupid). There are piranhas as big as jumbo jets jumping out of the river and exploding on impact. Some bad-ass martial arts dude just used some mixed martial arts to kill some baby piranhas which were as big as refrigerators. Anyway, I was just talking to a buddy of mine. Years ago back in junior high, my friends and I used to come up with stupid ideas for movies to pass the time away in school. Well, one of those ideas were about giant piranhas as big as Godzilla terrorizing some city. We were kids and we knew that was frig gin' stupid. But Asylum Films, they're laughing all the way to the bank. I went hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a master's degree to teach English Lit. to kids who don't even give a crap when I could have taken all those stupid ideas for movies way back in the day and made them for the SciFi Channel. Jesus! I am an idiot!

I had seen the original Edge of Darkness back in the middle eighties (around '86 or '87) when I was about 13 or 14. I didn't remember a lot about it but I knew that it was pretty special. I saw the trailer for the Mel Gibson version a few months back and decided to revisit the original for the first time in like 20 years. I just got finished watching a little while ago. My God. I'm speechless. One of the greatest pieces of television ever. What begins as a father trying to find justice and closure for his murdered daughter segues into a surprising and haunting look at the soul of humanity and its future place on this planet. Harlan Ellison would call this a dangerous vision and it is indeed that. One of the most remarkable television series I have ever seen and even with Martin Campbell directing the remake, I just don't see the film having the same gravitas as the original. You know to start commenting on this masterpiece, I feel I have to start with not its primary character, but its secondary one, here played by Joe Don Baker. Outside of the Walking Tall films, I didn't think much of Joe Don Baker. Boy was I wrong. His Darius Jedburgh is one of the most complex and unique heroes/anti heroes to ever grace the small screen. You're a bit repulsed by him at first, but then you fall in love with his character. His wit, cleverness and intelligence is remarkable and all from Baker doing what he needs to do. He is one of the good guys. "Man will always win against nature" he cynically says and that is rebuked near the end of the series by the last friend he will ever have in Bob Peck's Ronald Craven who says, "I think you're wrong. If there is a battle between the planet and mankind, the planet will win." Peck's Craven is what ultimately leads us to Jedburgh. Craven's the central character, a hard nosed yet honorable police detective who happens to be widowed and whose only daughter, Emma, is gunned down right in front of him. That begins a quest for Craven to uncover the truth behind Emma's death which leads what screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin may have envisioned, a battle between the forces of light and darkness for custody of the planet. Peck's performance is cool, reserved, a slow burn but in his eyes, in his eyes is a man losing all hope, all control. Those eyes of his are full of emptiness and pain. The most beautiful thing in his ugly, cynical world has been taken away from him. And what he thinks is a revenge killing against him gone wrong, becomes an investigation into a dark, dangerous world where the future of all of us hangs in the balance. Each layer that Craven uncovers to what at first appears to be simple street crime reveals a labyrithian conspiracy that exists which only a few are aware of and which is edging Craven closer and closer to madness. Peck's Craven rarely breaks down, he's in control of a chaotic situation, but when he lets his character rage at the world, you see a man broken, trapped and drowning. His emotions, his gravity of character takes us truly to the edge of darkness. "I am not on YOUR SIDE," he screams towards the end, letting loose all that he has lost, his daughter, his sanity, his life, his world. The true nature of the world has been revealed to him and he is no better for it. This was and is groundbreaking material. I don't want to spoil the intriguing hard science fiction plot with a pinch of the mystical simply because that would be the series undoing. And this is hard science fiction firmly rooted in real science and real speculation. Just grab on to something or someone and take a ride where darkness envelopes all who enter and where nothing is really what it seems.