When José Padilha made Bus 174, he was praised by many critics as having created a documentary that treated the poverty, addiction, desperation and corruption in Brazil's favela slums with exceptional sensitivity and care.  Now, a few years later, after his film Elite Squad (a narrative film that was originally meant to be a documentary) has become the most expensive -- and most profitable -- film in Brazilian cinema history, a lot of the same critics are calling him a quasi-fascist.

What happened?

In a revealing interview with the Guardian, Padilha -- alternating between defensive hostility and sincere pleading -- makes the case that whatever people think of Elite Squad, it does nothing but portray the everyday reality he set out to film.  The story of Bope, a police special forces unit that goes after Brazilian drug dealers and street gangs with the same murderous brutality with which the gangs go after each other, is so naked and unrelenting in its portrayal of the deadliest police killers since Cobra that it's easy to imagine the director meant it as an ode to oppression.  And his star, Wagner Moura, is so charismatic it's hard not to read his bloodthirsty, enthusiastically torturing Captain Nasciemento as a hero.

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I may have dosed off for a few minutes while watching the hammerhead Brazilian police drama Elite Squad. Listening to all that screaming and cursing and the sound of gunshots--it was just so much like being at home in my bed in the Bronx. A scandalous success in its native Brazil, Elite Squad is the latest post-City of God potboiler that depicts Rio de Janeiro as being just like Miami Vice except with fewer washed-up rock stars. Based on a book about Rio's special forces outfit known as BOPE, the movie is narrated by squad Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the hardest of hard men, who is looking for someone tough enough to replace him so that he retire and stop placing his life on the line and raise a proper family with his pregnant wife. Moura thinks there may be potential in a couple of young recruits, who also happen to be bestest buddies: Neto (Caio Junqueira), who seems tough and trigger-happy enough but is maybe just a teensy bit too Cro-Magnon to be trusted with large arsenals of weapons at his disposal, and Matias (Andre' Ramiro), who wears glasses and is smart and stuff, but may be too evolved to keep the savages in line. How to choose!? Faced with this head-scratcher, Moura addresses it the only way a real man can: he yells at everybody who comes within a mile of his office until you expect his throat to hemorrage. Then he takes to the training field to figure out which recruits have what it takes, by the time-tested method of yelling at them. Then, having used his famous leather lungs to keep Rio from cracking apart, he goes home to enjoy a relaxed evening of yelling at his wife. We must remain ever vigilant.

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