Film reviews: Elite Squad: The Enemy Within

Rioting in the streets, looting, violent confrontations with cops – if the TV news this week has shown some fairly appalling scenes, be thankful things aren't quite as bad as the appear to be in Rio, which, if Elite Squad 2 is anything to go by, is embroiled in an ongoing, full-on state of urban warfare more akin to an occupied country such as Iraq after the US invasion than a city dealing with a local crime wave.

Kicking off with an ironic disclaimer that "despite possible coincidences, this film is fictional", this sequel to 2008's Elite Squad presents an apparently very close-to-the-bone portrait of a city in which corruption and violence are so systemic that no strata of society is safe from bloodshed. This immediately makes the film a good deal more interesting than its predecessor, which suffered from frenetic pacing, impenetrable storytelling and an intrusive voice-over that all but killed the film's dramatic momentum.

Bigger in scope and more skilled at weaving together several interlinked storylines, the new film – which is directed once again by former documentary-maker Jos Padilha – has a much surer grip of what it wants to say and has lost some of the troubling fascistic overtones of its predecessor.

Not that it has completely eliminated them. The film once again makes a hero of Nascimento (Wagner Moura), a high-ranking official in the city's apparently incorruptible, jack-booted State Police Special Operations Battalion (otherwise known by its local acronym, BOPE). With the unit's insignia being a skull and two crossed machine guns, and their orders usually of the shoot-to-kill variety, their take-no-prisoners hard-line approach to crime can't help but come across as slightly celebratory in that old school Dirty Harry kind of way.

This is initially emphasised by the way the film pits Nascimento (whose voiceover is still present, but slightly less intrusive) against a liberal, human rights advocating civil servant called Fraga (Irandhir Santos). The latter's involvement in a prison siege results in Nascimento being kicked off the force after BOPE officers execute a group of hostage-taking hardnuts before Fraga's eyes.

But in a sign of how things actually work in Rio, Nascimento "falls upwards", finding himself elevated out of the favelas and into a high-ranking bureaucratic police job in which he thinks he'll be able to apply his uncompromising attitude to law enforcement to the system at large.

It's here that the film really starts to grip like a vice as Nascimento manages to wipe out the hitherto embedded traffickers whose stranglehold on the slums was thought to be Rio's biggest problem. What he finds instead is a new monster moving in to take their place in the form of corrupt cops who, upon realising the drug-dealing middlemen have been cut out of the equation, see an opportunity to run the favelas their way.

Taking the form of militias that control the supply and demand of every local amenity (resulting in hundreds of thousands in profits each month), they're protected by politicians who have managed to get elected and re-elected on the back of "cleaning up" the city. In essence, what Nascimento has inadvertently helped create is a brutal mafia underworld – one that he is determined to try and destroy.

Padilha is good at detailing the mechanics of these operations and the details have a ring of truth to them that's only slightly betrayed by a few of the hoary story beats he deploys to shift the action along. With the first film, which was set in 1997, focused on Nascimento's reluctant attempts to get out of the BOPE for the sake of his wife and newborn son, the new film chooses to saddle him with even more domestic strife.

Now divorced, his ex-wife has chosen to marry Fraga – and having his arch enemy as his son's stepfather just doesn't sit well with him, especially as Nascimento realises that Fraga may be one of the few people he can actually trust when the proverbial excrement starts hitting the fan.

Nevertheless, the overall story Padilha is exploring is meaty enough to make it easier to let such clich-ridden and unlikely devices slide. His visceral style – aided by the stunning way cinematographer Lula Caralho's shoots Brazil's streets without falling for the shanty-town chic that has been de rigeur since City of God – also ensures the piece works as a jacked-up action film without distracting from the fact that this is a movie that actually has something to say about the cause of the crime on the streets.

It may not offer any answers – but it should at least be commended for raising questions and showing that brute force, as appealing as it sometimes seems as a countermeasure, can have damaging repercussions far down the line.