Film Review: Elite Squad: The Enemy Within

For once I'm reviewing something which isn't an anime.  Unbelievable, right?  Anyway, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a thriller from Brazil about the struggles of BOPE, the Special Police Operations Battalion of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police, against the multitude of cartels, as well as internal corruption within the force and government.  It is the sequel to the original Elite Squad movie, which focuses more on the culture of BOPE and the people it recruits.  Elite Squad 2 takes place significantly later, and aside from recurring characters and some similar themes has little to do with the original movie.

When watching this movie, you will very quickly learn that Brazil is an incredibly messed up place.  The cartels are violent, the police is incredibly corrupt, and human rights are routinely violated by the police.  The worst part is that public opinion supports this police brutality, because the cartels are really that bad, and they go unpunished due to corruption.  If the choice is brutal or corruption, the people of Brazil overwhelmingly choose brutality and human rights violations.

That's not to say that the human rights activists don't exist.  They do exist, but they don't have much of a voice.  It takes one to nearly be murdered by police for them to have any say, and all they accomplish is get one human rights violator to leave the force, and instead get promoted because of public backlash to the firing.

This is the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; it's a brutal, corrupt mess.  The corrupt justify themselves by saying that at least they're not violent, while the violent justify themselves by saying that at least they're not corrupt.  And they all hate the human rights activists.

All of this is apparent with the character of our hero, Colonel Nascimento.  He's the leader of BOPE, the Special Police Operations Battalion, and also the movie's narrator.  He makes very clear what it is he believes in.  And that's in brutal assaults against the cartel members.  He has absolutely no respect for any of them, and if it were up to him he'd just shoot and kill everyone in the cartels, or better yet, let them kill themselves in a gang war.

The movie starts with our hero being called in alongside BOPE to deal with a prison break.  One cartel in the prison managed to get a hold of guns, and is killing other inmates, members of a rival cartel.  They take several officers hostage, and yet our hero orders BOPE to hold back until they finish off as many members of other cartels.

The order changes into holding back until their negotiator, a human rights activist and college professor married to Nascimento's ex-wife named Fraga, arrives by helicopter to attempt a peaceful solution.  Even apart from the whole thing about marrying his ex-wife, Nascimento hates this guy's guts.

If it were my call, I'd just throw out the keys let [the cartel members] kill themselves.  But left-wing intellectuals make a living out of scumbags.

It comes as no surprise that Nascimento uses his attempt at negotiating as a diversion.  As soon as the cartel lets their guard down, BOPE moves in and guns everyone down.  After a tense standoff, the leader of the gang, holding Fraga at gunpoint, is shot dead just as he starts to surrender, spilling blood on Fraga's t-shirt, which quite literally says, "HUMAN RIGHTS" in English text.  Naturally, the picture of blood splattered over a white HUMAN RIGHTS t-shirt causes a media frenzy which gets Nascimento fired.

Public opinion soon turns on the governor as the people as well as angry pundits with too many viewers support Nascimento's actions.  An alternate solution is then put forward: Nascimento's second in command Matias, the one who almost shot Fraga, agrees to take the fall, and Nascimento is given a job as the undersecretary of Rio de Janeiro Public Safety for Intelligence.  The role gives Nascimento even more power to make BOPE far stronger than before.  He uses his authority to wiretap almost every favela in Rio, uncovering organized crime in multiple areas, and forwarding the intel to BOPE.  BOPE in turn cleans up the streets, almost completely eliminating cartels it would seem.

Nascimento's whole reason for pushing BOPE forward is because he hates corrupt cops.  His goal is to eliminate the sources of bribery corrupt cops rely on by eliminating the cartels.  For the longest time, he believes that he's been highly successful.  The reality is that he's only made the problem worse, a reality which doesn't hit him until much later.

Dirty cops, realizing exactly what's going on, decide to fill the power vacuum by establishing their own organized crime militia.  They learn that because of all the BOPE drug busts, the drug trade is dying, but there's still money to be made in more creative means, such as pirated cable TV.  Soon, these dirty cops are heading the largest extortion ring in Rio, and are protected by virtue of being part of the system and buying votes for elected officials with their actions.  The elected officials then turn a blind eye to what the militia is doing, as the streets are safer under their control and the governor is getting the incredibly valuable slum voting block.

The heart of the movie is Nascimento finally discovering that the work he's been doing has only made the problem of police corruption worse.  Once he makes this discovery, a process which involves an assassination attempt on his own life among many, many other things, Nascimento ends up joining forces with Fraga, who has since become a state legislator.  Fraga uses his position to call for a congressional hearing, where Nascimento testifies to the incredible corruption.

What happens as a result is one of the largest sprees of witness executions in Brazilian history.  And despite the number of witnesses murdered, the governor of the state is rightfully put behind bars as a criminal.  The corruption and police-sponsored militia have received a massive blow.

Yet in spite of this the corruption soon returns, with the militia continuing its operations.  Nascimento as narrator asks a simple question, "Who do you think pays for all this?"  Silence follows, and then, "exactly."  The system is corrupt to the core, to the highest levels of government.  Rio gets the worst of it, and no matter what happens, the corruption persists.  It reorganizes itself, but will never truly vanish.  Nascimento's actions was a major blow, but ultimately only a temporary setback.  Only through hundreds or thousands of those blows can a significant change be made, a daunting task which Nascimento is not going to back down from.

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within paints a very dark picture of the worst aspects of Brazil.  Despite this, it ultimately paints a hopeful picture.  It doesn't do anything stupid like provide a happy ending; instead the ending is barely an improvement over the status quo.  Only in the context of how bad things could have gotten could the ending be considered happy.  The biggest takeaway is that Nascimento is in a position of high power, is much more aware of how tricky and deeply rooted the corruption is, and has made a powerful and unlikely ally of Fraga.

In my opinion, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is one of the best movies ever made.  I can easily see why it is Brazil's highest grossing film, and an absolute sensation in the country.  I would recommend it to all audiences, except for the fact that it is very, very violent.  I would say parental supervision required for anyone under 16.  That being said, I can't imagine anyone under 16 finding this movie that interesting.  I highly recommend this movie for anyone interested in seeing a more realistic take on action films, because this one is much more plausible than the vast majority of American-made blockbusters.

Anime Review: A Certain Magical Index

The Short Version:

A completely luckless loser with the ability to cancel out supernatural phenomenon keeps getting worse and worse luck.  It all starts when he finds a nun named Index laying on the balcony of his dorm, and gets worse when he discovers that sorcerers are trying to kill her.

A Certain Magical Index is an animated action-comedy TV series from Japan.  It is based on a series of light novels by the same name.  The show itself takes place in a fantastical version of modern-day earth, where Japan, especially the fictitious Academy City where the show takes place, is the center for research into psychic powers, referred to as ESP.  Meanwhile, the Church of England is the center for research into magical arts, despite the real-life Bible outright forbidding sorcery and magic.  Just go along with it; they don't mean any offense.

Our hero is the extraordinarily unextraordinary Toma Kamijo, whose only special ability is the ability to cancel out other special abilities.  This makes him a complete failure at school, as mandatory testing for ESP powers always gives him a score of zero, no matter how many remedial classes they make him take, or how painfully obvious it is that his power is easily the strongest in the entire city.  His only other traits are his strong desire for justice - which usually results in him getting his butt kicked, and having an outstanding ability to bluff - even after having one of his arms gruesomely cut off.

The story starts out with Toma running like hell from a street gang, after trying to help a girl who was being harassed by one of the members.  He ends up getting saved by the girl he tried to help, who turns out to be an extremely powerful ESPer.  Mikoto Misaka, or Railgun, specializes in generating and manipulating electricity, specifically to fire projectiles at extremely high velocities, hence her nickname. Against all common sense, he picks a fight with her, and survives.

The next morning, he wakes up in his apartment to discover an unconscious nun hanging over the railing of his balcony, who's also hungry enough to try to bite Toma's arm off.  This nun is named Index, and is the titular Certain Magical Index this show is about.  It turns out that she's being relentlessly pursued by sorcerers who want her dead because of the 103,000 grimoires she has memorized, and she just happened to end up at Toma's place so she asks for his help.  He's extremely skeptical of the whole thing, and remains so until he returns home after classes to find her bleeding to death on the ground, with a self-proclaimed sorcerer taking the credit.

All of that is the first episode.  The story appears fairly simple, but in reality has its fair share of twists and turns.  The next five episodes alone have an extremely well-thought-out and executed plotline.  If you're already interested in watching the show, then consider this a Spoiler Alert until the text returns back to normal.

The sorcerers who attacked Index are actually on her side.  Basically, the knowledge of the 103,000 grimoires she has memorized greatly limits how long she can go without having her memory routinely wiped every year, which the sorcerers have no choice but to do.  Somewhere along the way Index started to see them as assassins trying to kill her, which is right in a sense, expect that they're really on the same side and hate doing what they have to do to her.  This doesn't at all sit right with Toma, so he resists them, at least until Index becomes seriously ill.  With that, he has no choice but to hand her over, but he isn't giving up yet.  After doing research on how the mind works, he discovers that even with her photographic memory and all those books memorized, there's no way Index's mind could ever become full, meaning that there's another reason Index fell ill, and another reason the sorcerers have to dump her memories.  Most likely, it's a spell meant to ensure that Index is always loyal to the Church, and that she won't fall into the wrong hands, and the sorcerers themselves weren't let in on this at all.  He attempts to use his ability to cancel it out, but all he succeeds in doing is activating a trap which causes Index to mindlessly attack him with spells, something the Church claims she should be unable to do.  Eventually he succeeds in nullifying the spell, but at great cost; a final attack spell sent by Index hits Toma square on the head, bypassing his ability causing severe brain damage.  Thanks to the highly sophisticated medical technology at Academy city, he was able to make a complete recovery...at least as far as everybody else is concerned.  Just between him and the doctor, every last one of his memories were destroyed, and there's no hope of ever recovering them.  Index is none the wiser, and demands that Toma continue to be her guardian after he heroically saved her life from the sorcerers, who she still doesn't know are on her side.  Toma is now stuck guarding her just so that he can hide the truth, and is now forced to bluff his way through the rest of his life just to hide what happened to him.

That is one long paragraph, and this is the END OF THE SPOILER ALERT.  That's also just the first six episodes of 24.  The plot itself continues to have intelligent twists and turns, and Toma's loss of memory [oops, forgot to mark this one] comes back to bite him big time when he has to meet his family and doesn't remember a thing about them.  Still, the process of Toma rediscovering everyone he knows while covering it up and solving his struggles not by simply using his fists, but by using his fists with intelligence, makes the show an absolute blast to watch.  Add to it plenty of comedic elements, and you have a recipe for an fun and surprisingly smart adventure.

By no means is A Certain Magical Index without its flaws, but those flaws are relatively minor.  They hold the show back from becoming one of my favorites, but it's still a very enjoyable experience with its unique take on an overused plot element.  I officially recommend this to anyone who can put up with bloody violence and foul language.  In terms of a family-friendliness rating, I give this a upper teens rating, younger with parental approval, and like most Anime, NOT FOR YOUNG CHILDREN.

A Certain Magical Index is licensed by FUNimation in the United States and can be found streaming on Hulu.  All episodes are available for free in Japanese with English subtitles, and as of writing this review the first four episodes are also available with an English-language dub.  Horribly-overpriced DVDs are also available, but if you're like me you'd rather put up with short commercial breaks every episode than spend $100 to get both parts of the series on DVD.