Elite Squad w/ Karl Dahl: Ep. 457

more prominent filmmakers. This, as far as I understand, I'm Not Brazilian, is sort of seen as the Brazilian god Father, right, kind of the the archetypal Brazilian crime movie.

technically communist narco gang. And then Bope, we're talking like hundreds of casualties in urban warfare. You know, you've got like Brazilian guys with like Madsen machine guns just laying down fire and flavellas. So this is a fictionalized account, but only kind of. So anyway, Carl, I'm curious before we jump into it, had you ever seen this movie and what were your thoughts on it? I, you know what, I saw it a long time ago.

insisted upon. But instead of people living in favelas where they build you know, shanties that we of the kind that we see in this film, you know, in America, it's all paid for by, you know, from our taxes. The really interesting thing is Bope is a They are military police, but not in the sense in America when you think of MPs. They mostly focus on you know, handling members of the military, right whether it's on base or going off base to deal with them when they're

getting getting a little wacky. No they are a basically public security but through the military, so they have a huge amount of a huge amount of leeway, let's say, in dealing with with things, and very villainized by the Brazilian lib tards, of which there are legion given given the state of Brazil and the fact that they've had they've been dealing with basically insurgencies for gosh, seventy eighty years in Brazil. So yeah, it's it's pretty wild stuff.

And you know, the takeaway that I have from this film, there's takeaways that you can come to that are you know, top level like kind of like we were discussing before, you know, practical responses to reality, but then they're the main takeaway that I have is that Brazil is hell on Earth and you cannot let that happen here. Yeah.

the cartel. And our B plot is the two other kind of main characters, these these rookie police officers Andre and Nito. Again, it's in Portuguese. We both watched it with subtitles because we're adults. There is an English version floating around. It is thoroughly adequate, but you know, I prefer the original. And the story begins sort of in media race, right. We'll get more backstory after this opening scene,

and it is an all time great opening scene. Actually, Carl, I don't know if you remember all the way back when we had our conversation about your book Faction with the Crusaders by book, one of the things that I complimented on you, or complimented you on rather, was you had a really good, strong, opening scene, sort of set

the mood. I didn't say it, but in my head, I was thinking, it's a lot like Elite Squad, where you have this incredible, you know, sort of action set piece that pulls you in and then later we explain how our characters got there, so obligatory by the book. It's good, it's interesting, probably the only direct relation between these two, at least for now. But I will say the scene is awesome. You have a group of different police officers sort of coming together in this block party.

The song in the block party is is reprised several times through the movie. Yeah, it is so catchy, man, it's a it's an earworm.

extra vowels appended to the end of every word. You know it it's like a beat, yeah, and a salsa beat and and and it's it is an earworm, but it's also horrible at the same time, which it which is this degrading, degrading third world experience that that is

is so immersive in this movie. The lighting I was telling Jay before we started the lighting in this if you've ever spent time in the third world will give you you will be so immersed in this and you'll be having flashbacks and you're like, god, I hate this place. It's awful.

there's also a police car. And what we sort of realize is happening is that these police officers are effectively selling guns, right, I have that, correct, Carl, Yeah, correct, to these gangsters. So right from the beginning we are seeing this sort of endemic corruption within the police force.

than that. Yes, you have people running. The guns in this are particularly interesting into a lot of actual Brazilian stuff. So some of the gangsters obviously have like you know, AC five five sixes, which is you know, a ruger you know, kind of mini fourteen auto mini oozzies. But I don't know if you picked up on this. The uh submachine gun that one of the corrupt cops is carrying is a Brazilian knockoff of the Danish Madson submachine gun. Yeah, yeah,

And I looked into it. It is the most comedically crude weapon in the world when I was looking into it. It is made of basically two like like stamped sheet steel shells that are just kind of held together, and then the nut that holds on the barrel also holds them together together. Apparently, I don't know anything about this. This is what the Internet tells me. Uh, you don't take it off the right way, it will dude across the room and yeah, vomit all the parts out there.

also see him in The Godfather. They have nine millimeter versions in The Godfather.

a death squad. And after that scene wraps up, of course, and that's sort of you know, we see them, you know, see Bope, and it's like, oh wow, that was you know,

this special unit I didn't even know about. We go back to, you know, both of these guys joining the police force, right in this kind of normal, just kind of run of the mill police station, and they're each assigned to very kind of you know, menial duties, right Nido I. He is put in charge of the police complaints, which is probably the closest thing to comedy in this movie. You know, both the absurd numbers of police planes and

also just the blatant corruption. Like one of the things we see happen in this film is that anytime someone is killed, the first police that find it, they don't actually report it or do anything with it. They just move the body into someone else's district, right, Yeah.

what they're trying. They're trying to really push this so that you so that you take this away and internalize it is that Bope is brutal, but they're the only honest,

polite and competent police here. There's this whole element like at the same time where you know, one of the guys has to work in the auto shop, like maintaining the police cars, and like police officers will like have the engine, the good engine swapped out at a shop and pocket the difference in money that they get paid and have a crappy you know, like two hundred thousand mile engine put in and stuff. It's completely crazy, just constant. Oh yeah.

towing companies. That this in itself is a massive scam, right that the police officers are you know, towing cars, issuing tickets, pocketing the money and are as we've seen at the start of this movie in bed with you know, local gangsters, and in fact, we find out that that whole shootout basically started because they saw that you know, one of their coworkers was in bed right, that he was you know, meeting with local you know gangsters, that he was giving them weapons, that he was tipping them

off as to when you know, the police were coming. And you know, these guys get incensed by it, and that's why after they you know, they attempt themselves to go, you know, follow this corrupt officer creates this giant shootout.

They see Bobe come in and that's why they're like, oh, I want to join, right, So that's the the sort of plot component to that in the background, we find out that one of our characters, Nido is uh he is in law school, right, so he is played as very idealistic and he wants to basically, you know, go from being a street officer to a sort of like a prosecutor, right to sort of you know, continue his kind of fight against crime. And the scenes at the

university are legitimately hilarious. Carl like this movie. There's a there's a cheap reading of this movie that it's about you know, police brutality, and it kind of is, but not really at all. It heaps scorn on the kind of Brazilian middle and upper classes you know, who go to university and love to read Fuko and talk about how, you know, criminal justice is just a way to to

keep the to keep the little man down. But uh, do you want to talk about you know, his scenes at college because I like the probably some of the most interesting, you know, kind of dialogue in the film.

although they have classes with kids and help them with homework and stuff like that, but it's basically done with the permission of the drug lord in the area. And so Andre Matias wants to get a pair of glasses. He wears these big, thick glasses, and he wants to get glasses for another kid who is basically like him as a child that he sees him that way, and so he has this perspective. He's like, I know the

way these places work. I know where this comes from. Yes, they're a corrupt police, but there's also good police, and corrupt police doesn't excuse the crime and corruption that you see not only here but everywhere in our whole society. And all the lip chards are like no police bad.

That's like literally there there the level of thought that they have, which is which is one of those things Jay that I think is really important that we need to internalize here is because there's this this delusion that that you hear expressed all the time on kind of the American I'll just broadly call it the right right where they say, you know, let things get bad enough. It's the it's the acceleration COPE. Let things get bad enough and then everyone will be outraged and will like

stop it. And it's like no, Brazil, South Africa, like you have earnest libtards in these places who deal with this stuff all the time. You know, they see it all the time, but they still you know, make excuses and uh you know. So Andre Matias is like, no, no excuses. And he starts out being really quiet while this stuff is happening because he wants to fit in. He wants to you know, go with the flow. He

doesn't want to argue constantly or he'll debate quietly. But it like escalates over time as it not only and that the way they put it in the film is not only because of his belief, but he becomes a member of BOPE and and he transforms into a warrior basically. Yeah.

use that to actually fix up the motor pool. And this is blamed on the corrupt officer who ends up, you know, going into the Flabella actually sent there as punishment, right, because this is a dangerous duty by the higher ups. This guy also sort of goes to try out with Bope and the training montage is from what I've seen, because there's actually a decent amount of footage of this incredibly accurate, like even them, you know, doing things like

standing in the swamp. You know, that's something that you can see in documentary footage, right, it's pretty much one to one accurate. But that process of weeding them out, one of the things that happens is that they're also being weeded out for corruption. And so this one officer, I can't remember his name, it's something, ends with an avowal and he is explicitly pulled out by Nacimento as corrupt.

You know, he sends him home. So the interactions what we see is that basically throughout the film, Nido is living sort of a double life. He is not necessarily told his college friends that, you know, he is a police officer, and so at least initially they sort of

he is. We see that sort of dissonance, right where these people who live in safegated communities and go to you know, an expensive school and then only venture into the Flabella's to basically do kind of self aggrandizing charity work have really no idea what it's like very clearly, uh, And it's kind of interesting because what we later find out sort of towards the climax of the film is that even these even these rich kids are there, they

are the ones funding these these you know, drug trafficking, right, They're the ones buying drugs to use it parties. And you know, very explicitly we see the train from kind of like a small time college dealer to you know, the local drug kingpin, right, and that connection so you we'll get to it later, but sort of builds up

to the kind of climactic conclusion of this film. But I think it's interesting that for a movie ostensibly about you know, unaccountable police violence, and you know, that is often how it has read, particularly in the West, the people causing so many of these problems are basically college educated libtards.

that will solve any of these problems. And certainly the film is part is fatalistic, right, because the system is so corrupt and so violent. But I think that that, you know, is really the soul of the film is we're watching Neto over the course of it sort of shed his idealism, right, shed this sort of unrealistic dream about, you know, being a poor kid from a favella, than

a police officer, than a than a prosecutor. His realization is basically, I have to become a killer, like that is the way that you know, I can fight this and fix this because evil must be stamped out. That is the conclusion, right. It's it's an oddly I mean say this euphemistically, Carl, but it's it's sort of a fascistic film. It is.

proven right every step of the way. You know, you know, the the meme that came to my mind is dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed, right, and that's that's literally the solution to all this because they they go into a they go into a I'll charitably call it a rooftop hut where there's a where there's a kid who has a pair of shoes that cost like three hundred and fifty dollars and it's the only like clean, bright thing in the room, right, Like everything else looks like shit.

It's all like fourth hand discarded trash. He sleeps on what we could uphemistically refer to as like a straw mattress at best. It's just it's it's it's barely a hovel. A hovel is charitable and they're like, where did you get these shoes? And they know where you got these shoes. He works for the drug dealers, right. The libtards would say, well, he has no other opportunities. You know, it's society, et cetera. You know, why why would why would he have shoot?

You know, he can't do the whole logical thing of where he would spend this this money in a more in a better way to take care of his family and improve their conditions. Because of the conditions they're in. This is a thing that he wants. As Selene Dion would say, let them touch those things, and uh, you know, so he's basically anocent kid. Bope says, well, you're gonna tell us, And so they slap them around a little bit. And then they what what is the term that they

use in the film. They say, bag him or something like that, which involves taking a you know, disregarding the the label, they take the plastic bag and put it over his head and suffocate him in a rather graphic fashion for maybe ten twelve seconds while wrenching him around violently so that he starts huffing and puffing and it's a highly unpleasant experience. And then they take it off his head and ask him slap him around a little bit he doesn't talk. Well, they do it a third

time and he talks. So the crazy thing is every stage of this movie, their intensification of violence is justified by the outcomes that they get because they didn't actually kill him, They didn't permanently harm him by doing this, right, they let him go. They have a thing earlier with the kid who's a lookout who the gang then murders,

right because he talked. And it's very touching because the mother comes to our police captain Nacimento and when he has a child on the way and is like, I need to know where my son's body is so that

we can bury him. That's another really important element of this is there's a is like taking care of the body, treating the body with respect, having a funeral, like that closure that you get from it, you know, in the positive sense, motivates this captain to go out into the favelas to just try to find this child's body, to figure out what happens to him, so the mother can have closure, so that he can have closure as his child is on the way, so that you can like

quit this job in the way that he's promised his wife, who is unbearably nagging in this film. She is she is very annoying, but it's understandable also.

that scene with you know, when they bag someone. Uh, there is also a show is a highly disturbing threat made with a broom handle, yuh, which they didn't do, but uh, you know, it certainly motivated him to talk, but they do let him go afterwards, and we see over and over again the NARCO is obviously, you know, killing anyone who speaks with the police. But you know, even in the kind of you know, climactic moments of this film, even on Suspicion, kill people in horrific ways.

So obviously media not quite a third, but a large portion of this is about uh, you know, the Bope training, right, these guys becoming you know, members of this this sort of you know, death squad, and it's one of the all time great sort of you know training you know arcs in a city like this. Yeah, like almost immediately, you know, we see our characters brought out to this kind of tent in the middle of nowhere, and they're

getting shark tanked. You know. All the guys are running up, you know, punching them, you know, yelling in their face.

We we also see, you know, in this sort of section, we see them you know, doing you know, long marches, you know, going through the jungle, standing in swamps, lots of lots of footage of trench foot which is accurately rendered, and we're seeing this group sort of constantly. Yeah, it's it's this is not a this is not a film for the whole family on a multitude of different metrics. But yeah, if you're sent whatever that it's not triggonosis.

That's what you get from eating raw pork whatever. The phobia is of a small holes, not a great one for that.

of secondary character. Uh. You know, Nido, he gets a boupe tattoo once he's he's finally graduated on his arm, which turns out to be turns out to be very relevant. So after you know, they go through the you know, bope training, after the corrupt officer is you know, is out, Uh, basically, Andre and his you know kind of art ho law

school girlfriend, their relationship blows up. She is aware he was captured you know, on photo as being a member of you know, bope what she believes that this sort of death squad, and so, you know, she breaks up with him. He's now a social pariah. We see that everyone is aware of this. They don't want anything to do with him. So he sort of just decided, you know, all right, I'm gonna hoist the black flag like we're

we're out there. And this kind of small town dealer, the one that's you know, supplying weed primarily to the college kids, we know that, you know that Andreas picked up on this, right, so he goes and confronts him. He basically you know, slaps him around, you know, basically says like you know, demands information from him, and this information makes its way back to the local drug kingpin.

Right he knows, oh wait, you know, not only has one of my dealers presumably given information to uh, you know, to the police, but we find out that this NGO, which is also connected to the same to the same drug kingpin, he's sort of whitewashing his image through it.

were were screwed, right, we have made a mistake. But also at the same time, the cartel is basically moved to a sweep up this kind of in these NGO workers who they think have been compromised and uh, this is m perhaps the darkest moment of the film. They're you know, they're grabbed at gunpoint and one of the girls is executed, and the guy who's running this like clinic or ngo or whatever, uh is uh stuffed into a roll of tires and set on fire. It's a very very grim scene.

this movie isn't super linear. I was going hard to follow, but it's not like, you know, it's not like You're Of the Dragon, where it's one plot all the way through and you can just sort of rattle through it. It sort of loops back on itself. But I'll give you a chance to respond, Carl And I.

now this makes sense. Here's this unit that acts like of police bope that acts like an infantry squad, whereas all the others are all these other cops and we know their backgrounds, we know why they were sent out there, et cetera. But you also know that this is going to be completely insane because because because they're going loaded for bear and they're they're basically like, we have to

kill this guy. Like they're not. They're not going in to be like, let's make arrests and everything like that. They're like, no, We're going to have to go kill these guys, and uh, which is it? Which is just you know, from a from a perspective as a film viewer, highly entertaining, and you're like this, I know that this is going to be good, and we're also going to get a lot of stuff that we didn't see and in that earlier film part of the film to round it out, So a lot.

not really it's not really expressed. And so to me, this screams that there's something going on there in the film, like behind that, but no one ever says it. They don't do the whole thing. Well, it's because Brazil's racist, they don't do that, which is very interesting. It's very interesting.

But to your point, Nito blows it in his kind of like final training that you mentioned earlier, where they actually go in to a bombed out hellscape like it I think it's a I think it's a favella that was being bulldozed and there's still you know, drug gang holdouts, and it's literally like there's the guy with a rifle shoot him, right. It's literally that kind of an operation, and he does a very bad job of it, Like he ends up like out on his own, kind of

like not staying with everyone else. It's kind of incoherent. It happens really quickly, but Nacimento is like, this guy isn't the guy and and so, which is another burden on Nacimento because you know, his wife is nagging him. I can't remember if his baby is born yet at this point in time, but.

at him, trying to get information on it. And we've seen kind of in this build up and it's sort of interspersed between the last two scenes. We were talking about Bope going around to other dealers, torturing them to find out the identity of this this drug kingpin and uh whose name is uh.

And the final confrontation is very well done. But the way this movie ends, and when we see you know, Andrea sort of become Nasimento, right, he has fully sort of shed his humanity is you know, the dealer at the end, he's he's wounded and Nacimento hands a massan off shotgun. It's basically like, all right, you know what you need to do, and the dealer's on the ground.

And this is the reprisal of that theme earlier we mentioned about about bodies right in the Importance of Funeral, he basically just says like, all right, you know, just just not in the face. I want my mom to be able to see me, and for the wake, for the wake, for the wake, and Andre levels the gun right at his face, cut to black. You hear a boom. So there's a little bit of ambiguity there, right, did he did he still have any mercy left? Or was he you know, sort of a true you know, stone

cold killer at that point. I my version of it, Uh, just all in a genuinely great film. And like I said, thematically, what we're seeing is you know, Andre being stripped of his of his idealism, right, stripped of this idea that he can ascend up the social ladder, stripped of this idea that you know, he can can meet with the kind of you know, upper crust of society and do real good. The less of this film is ultimately it's like, no, the only way this can be solved is to stamp

them out. It is to quote Rothbert right, to send in the hounds. And in order to do that, you can't be squishy. This cannot be half measures. It needs to be you know, brutal and uncompromising. And as I said earlier, sure there's a certain amount of fatalism to this, right, this irreparably broken system. But if we're looking at kind of the lessons for our guys, right, the things that

we would find interesting in this film. One, obviously, the social critique of educated progressives is kind of funny, but also right, the idea that like mercy in defense of criminals as advice, that's what enables these sort of situations and to solve those issues, right, to solve that kind of deep corruption, it's like, well, you need killers, you need people who are sort of beyond human, they don't have morality in the same way that we do. To

accomplish that end. And in order to do that, there's sort of no there's no half measures. Personally, you can't still have you know, your normal life where you hang out with your progressive friend, like it has to become your life, and that is your sort of purpose on the world is to be sort of a you know, a killer on behalf of the state it's a it's

a really fascinating film. One of the things that we didn't mention is that Nacimento is constantly in and out of sort of you know, state mandated therapy, right with like basically an HR lady who is completely and totally hopeless in this film. You know, she's asking him the most kind of absurd, out of touch questions, you know, telling him like, oh, if you report anything, I'll have to take it up the chain of command. You will be kicked out of your job.

than he than he was before. But it is this level of obliviousness where he's like, just give me a drug for it or something like that, you know, And there's one other there's one other thing that that he does, which again comes back to that funeral topic that keeps coming up as far as like separating them from the norm, and it's the it's Nido's funeral, which is very touching.

You know, everyone goes out there and they're all they're very they're furious at this point, right, like the Bope guys are furious, and the you know, his casket is there and it's covered with the Brazilian flag, and Nasciamento walks up and unfurls the Baupe flag and puts it over it. And what is the Boupet flag. It's red and black with a skull and a golden dagger and two crossed pistols behind it. And so he comes in and he's basically like, let me remind everybody what this

is about. Like, he's our guy, he was one of us. We accepted him. Ultimately, he was accepted. He didn't he wasn't making the cut, you know, to be to take over. But he was still one of our guys, and I don't really care about your norms. For his funeral, he

was one of us. Which is incredibly interesting because if you if you notice, like it kind of upsets the civilians, like his family and stuff like that back there, the women are like taken aback by it, but all the men just get hardened and they're just they're just stone faced at that point.

book by two former operators, Bope operators and a sociologist. Right, And it seems as if there's basically no relation to whatsoever between the plot of the book and the plot of the movie. The plot of the book is basically about how like Beaupe or a bunch of like gross meanis who hate democracy and beat people up sometimes, and the movie is like, Bope is a bunch of super cool dudes who beat people up all the time, because yeah, exactly,

which I think is is an interesting note. But from what I could see, and I am not Brazili and I cannot read Portuguese, but it does seem as if there's sort of a an echo of our high and low alignment on the issue of crime enforcement in Brazil as there is in America, where it is sort of fashionable in elite circles to you know, look down on that. Truly,

wherever you go, the progressives are exactly the same. We mentioned some of the you know, the weapons in this you know obviously you have you know, the madicine that isn't like super prominent, but it's like probably the most interesting or unique we've got all the all the nineties classics, right, You've got a couple of really cool seeds with Nazi Vento with an MP five ooozies. Of course, a bunch of you know, horrible Taurus knockoffs of much better firearms.

But the my and it's not ever given a lot of screen time, of course, is uh, you know, the guy's running CQB with a full length you know, m bel f a L which is yeah.

So it's the same rifle that they're using in their training scenes, which are probably pretty much just you know, rusted shut in the training but they you know, but in this one, so he has that and then it has like a forward like scout mount scope, so it's you know, super forward glass where that you know, the rear, the rear of it is in front of the action so that you can load stripper clips and stuff like that. I was like, hell, yeah, super great.

Is it has the very mid two thousands shaky cam right like you saw in the Bode movies and stuff like that, which certainly does add to sort of the frenetic pace of it. But one of the guys I was watching with it was like, dude, I can't look at this. My eyes are about to like I'm gonna throw up. So it's a minority position, but something to be aware of. The soundtrack to this movie, as we've already mentioned, some of it is kind of popular Brazilian

movie music from the late nineties. Other of it is you know, moral orchestral is quite good if you're interested in that. And this movie is super easy to find. I think it's on Amazon if you're willing to sail the high seas because it's in Brazil. Of course, you can find a copy of it at your favorite website, but I'd highly recommend it It's very watchable. If you know you're you enjoy those kind of you crime movies, this is a very good one.

they're going to be bleeding. They're going to be bleeding.

officers moving a body from one district to another. They're again very managerial, this whole system designed to not actually do anything but simply make it look better, you know, so you know, reporting murders as drowning victims or drug overdoses, you know, anything they can to you know, basically dodge

responsibility for that. And again that creates the necessity for this sort of like we could almost say like odanic figure, you know, or this kind of like heroic figure that is, you know, Bope, and by extension, our main characters who you basically sidestep all of that, you know, who go and sort of meet evil on its own terms instead of trying to you know, manage it out of the exists the uh and I realize people are understandably annoyed by you know, quote unquote social commentary. It's it is

certainly there. It is interesting, it is well expressed and not didactic. And also if you just want to watch a movie where guys shoot each other, you got that too. So yeah, Carl, I really enjoyed talking with you about this movie. It's one of my favorites. Uh, and honestly, I they're you know, the the Last Things Film Festival has been permanently shuttered. But I did do a review on it for that.