DVD Reviews: Elite Squad/The Times of Harvey Milk

Published on Thursday 29 January 2009 16:48

Elite Squad (Optimum, £17.60) Gomorrah (Optimum, £19.56) The Times of Harvey Milk (Drakes Avenue Pictures, £12.72)

FOLLOWING CITY OF GOD, FAVELA Rising and City of Men, the latest Brazilian expose of Rio's poverty-fuelled crime explosion looks at the city's mean streets through the pitiless eyes of the police force's black-clad, jack-booted, armed-response unit, known locally as BOPE (translated, the acronym stands for State Police Special Operations Battalion). In a world where snivelling regular cops use poor pay as an excuse to take bribes from drug dealers, this "elite squad" should represent the best-of-the-best – an incorruptible force of good in a heavily compromised world. Alas, their skull-and-crossed-guns emblem tends to reflect their brutal, merciless, head-exploding shoot-to-kill policies.

That should be the film's cue to serve up an incendiary picture of state-sponsored abuse and corruption. Instead the film offers a fascistic celebration of fighting gunfire with gunfire as it follows desperate-to-quit Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) as he initiates and trains his two most promising replacements. True, the film does make token attempts to provide an idea of what it takes to do the job and the effect it has on those who sign up for it, yet too often it simply gets off on its own visceral nature. From its opening ghetto shoot out, it unfurls at a frenetic clip, the thrill of which quickly becomes deadening, especially as it is accompanied by Nascimento's unrelenting voice-over narration, which is far too intrusive and tends to reiterate what is unfolding on screen, much like a bad DVD commentary. The use of genuine locations does add an air of authenticity, but in the end this is little more than an exploitation film with art-house pretensions.

Much better is Gomorrah, a based-on-fact Italian drama that offers a local perspective on the organised crime rather than one filtered through the glamorised viewpoint of Hollywood. There's certainly nothing glamorous about the Camorra, a Mafia-like Neapolitan crime syndicate believed to be responsible for 4,000 deaths in the last 30 years and a poisonous presence in all aspects of life in the region, infecting everyone from the street kids and low-level hoods to working-class families and supposedly legitimate businessmen. Indeed, according to Gomorrah, which is based on a best-selling, exhaustively researched book by Roberto Saviano, its reach is so great it can even influence the fashion choices of the Hollywood elite. Befitting the Camorra's viral nature, the film serves up a series of interweaving storylines that show how everything is connected and how little morality exists when it comes to money. The density of the plot, combined with the approach and the fact it's in Italian, makes it often hard to follow, but on DVD its initial impenetrability isn't quite the issue it was in cinemas.

Finally this week, there's a welcome reissue of the Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which offers a wonderfully insightful portrait of the slain American gay-rights activist and San Francisco politician. Made in 1984, it was a huge influence on Gus Van Sant's new Sean Penn-starring biopic, Milk, which makes use of the same archival material. Indeed it's a more direct and moving account than the slightly sentimentalised movie version, showing how fearless Milk was and how, as a community organiser and politician in the 1970s, profoundly he changed people's attitudes to homosexuality. It also provides a more complete picture of Milk's colleague and killer, Dan White, taking the story past the film version's end-point to examine the travesty of justice White's lenient sentence represented, as well as the chaos that erupted in San Francisco afterwards.