BLACK DEATH (2010)

Christopher Smith's film is a horror movie set during the mid-14th century plague that devastated Europe. It's a horror film by virtue of its treatment of paganism. Were it not a horror film, the village against which the knight Ulric (Sean Bean) launches a mini-crusade probably would be portrayed consistently as a utopian island of tolerance for many ways of knowing in a polluted sea of Christian intolerance. But because it is a horror film, the village's female ruler, Langiva (Carice von Houten) can be portrayed as just as vicious as Ulric's little band of secular inquisitors. They've heard rumors of a village that somehow has held the plague at bay, but allegedly at the cost of human sacrifice. They're guided to the place by Osmund (pre-stardom Eddie Redmayne), a monk recently freed from quarantine with an apparent clean bill of health. He's had enough of monastic life, however, and wants to run off with a local girl, Averill (Kimberly Nixon). Guiding Ulric to the mystery village will let Osmund keep a rendezvous with her, but it looks as if Averill is taken by local brigands whom Ulric's men barely fight off. Langiva's village looks like a welcome respite, even if it looks too clean and neat to be true to the experienced moviegoer's eye.

Sure enough, Langiva has drugged the wine she offers to Ulric's men and soon has them penned up for sacrifice -- unless they recant their Christian faith. She's not only as intolerant as her antagonists, but she has, if anything, less honor. When one of Ulric's men cracks and recants, she has her henchmen escort him away, only to execute him at a discreet distance from the village. What was the point of that but pure malevolence? Yet at the same time, there's a hint that Langiva has real power. She reveals to Osmund that she's recovered Averill's body, and later shows that she can resurrect the dead. And yet, unsurprisingly, something's not right about the revived girl. She can't talk and seems to have lost her mind. Convinced that she's suffering a fate worse than death, Osmund heartbrokenly restores her to the grave -- only for Langiva to torment him with the cruel truth. Of course she was a fraud all along and had simply pulled a Serpent and the Rainbow type stunt on Averill to impress her followers and Osmund. Averill had never actually died until her beloved killed her.

Needless to say, Osmund is a ready collaborator when Ulric finally makes his move, which proves surprising, plausible and cruelly vindictive. Earlier in the picture, he'd had to put down one of his own men who'd come down with the plague. Now, before Langiva has him quartered, the aspiring martyr reveals that he, too, has the plague -- and, presumably, so will much of the once-pristine village.  Of course, this means that a lot of arguably innocent people are going to suffer, while Langiva herself manages to slink away to an unclear fate.

Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here about the consequences of mutual intolerance, but because Black Death is a horror film it has the courage not to let anyone learn the lesson. Instead, the denouement shows Osmund as a remorseless, delusional witch hunter, torturing innumerable women, guilty or not, in pursuit of the elusive Langiva. I dig a bleak worldview like that, and the action and acting here weren't bad, either. It's no masterpiece by any stretch, but Smith's horror approach gives us probably the best possible Black Death that we could expect.

CENTURION (2010)

Once a hot genre director, Neil Marshall will release his first theatrical feature film in nine years when the Hellboy reboot -- heralded by an unimpressive trailer in theaters now -- premieres this April. Marshall, who made his name worldwide with The Descent in 2005, has been stuck directing TV since Centurion flopped in 2010. It's a film I've long been curious about, but maybe it's part of the problem that I've only just gotten around to seeing it. Whatever the case, now that I have seen it I can say it wasn't that bad, but there are some things I didn't care for. The CGI blood sprays are unrealistically instantaneous, for instance, and I still find it jarring to hear Roman soldiers from nearly 2,000 years ago using modern swear words. I understand it's meant to make them relatable as common men rather than antique aliens, but just as when I tried to watch the Spartacus TV show it always threatens to take me right out of the story. Hollywood has conditioned me too well, I guess. Anyway, on the positive side of the ledger Centurion is an often-impressive outdoor action picture that suggests a symbolic birthing of Britain from the mating, promised at the end, of the best of both worlds, Roman and Briton (or Pict), though each is in a tiny minority. Starting out as the sole survivor of a Roman outpost overrun by the woad-wearing savages, Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) escapes only to lead the remnants of the almost-annihilated Ninth Legion back to safety behind the new line of defense, Hadrian's Wall. For his trouble he's targeted for death by unscrupulous officials who want no one to tell of the legion's sad fate -- led into an ambush by a treacherous guide (Olga Kuryenko) who was trusted by the highest authorities. Marshall likes his strong female, so the guide Etain becomes the primary antagonist of the picture, leading the Picts with her super tracking skills while Quintus rallies a motley band, not all of whom are worth saving, to safety. Along the way the Romans take shelter with Arianne, a woman exiled by the Picts for alleged witchcraft (Imogen Poots) who seems the nearest thing to a "real" Englishwoman on screen. She knows Latin (the Picts speak in subtitles, making the natives the "other" against the multicultural but all Anglo inflected Romans) just as Quintus has mastered Pictish, each finding in the other at last an object for sincere cross-cultural communication. In the environment established by Marshall Arianne seems too good to be true, but I suppose such people are exceptional everywhere. The point seems to be that she and Quintus aren't going to find good people anywhere else. The main point, however, is that the action scenes justify this film's existence. Marshall arguably is a good enough action director that he doesn't need to punctuate his combats, but once a horror guy, always a horror guy. After a while the decapitations and such started to seem sophomorically superflous, but in the climactic fight, with the last three Romans defending an abandoned fort (introduced in a scene like something out of Northwest Passage) against a foolhardy final Pictish attack, Marshall focuses on drama rather than effects and makes the best scene in the film. You can see why he's remained in demand for genre projects, though maybe the film as a whole also shows in its excesses why he hasn't been given a chance to do something of his own for so long now.

TAG (2015)

TAG may or may not have been a nostalgic exercise for Sion Sono, but watching it was a nostalgic exercise for me. Back when I bought my first DVD player, I rushed about trying to see as many exotic movies as were now available to me, picking from the tremendous inventories to be found in places like Borders in those long-gone days. One early purchase was Sono's Suicide Club (also known as Suicide Circle). That film memorably opens with a bunch of schoolgirls marching into a subway station and leaping arm in arm in front of an oncoming train. Waves of blood splashed back onto the platform. Since then, Sono has been a very prolific and eclectic filmmaker. I'd be tempted to call Tag his Sucker Punch if not that there are probably a lot of Sucker Punches in his filmography. In any event, the opening scene will bring back memories for anyone who's seen Suicide Club/Circle. This time the schoolgirls are taking a bus to a field trip. A pillow fight breaks out while Mitsuko (Reina Treindl), apparently an aspiring writer, scribbles in her notebook. Dropping her pen, she ducks down to pick it up off the floor of the bus. That fortuitous move saves her life as a freakish wind shear, which had already torn apart the bus in front, takes the top halves off Mistuko's bus and all her fellow passengers. The driver is seated lower down and only loses her head. The bus slowly comes to a stop as our dazed heroine-by-default stands amid the blood-spurting trunks of her school chums. All righty then....

It occurs to Mitsuko to get off the bus and seek cover. She manages to duck a second wind shear (others aren't so lucky) and makes her way to a pond in the woods, where she finds more bisected corpses. Finding at least one clean set of clothes, she switches into them and makes her way to a school. It's not her school, but everyone there seems to recognize her. She quickly falls in with new friends who decide to play hooky in another part of the woods -- or is it the same location with the bodies gone? Finally they head back to class, but Mitsuko's new teachers prove to be strict disciplinarians, opening fire on their students with machine guns. Again, Mitsuko ends up the final girl, but this is not the final chapter for her.

She finds herself being prepared for a wedding, except now everyone calls her Keiko, and she has actually become a different person (Mariko Shinoda). There are familiar faces among the bridesmaids, however, who advise her that she's going to have to fight her way out of her wedding. By now, when all the wedding guests are girls, audiences may have noticed that we haven't seen a man in the film yet. The girls' congratulations turn to taunts as many strip to their underwear and drag Mitsuko/Keiko to the altar, where the boar-headed groom awaits inside an upright coffin. An ally comes to our heroine's rescue, and as they fight free our protagonist finds herself again transformed (into Erina Mano) and in the homestretch of a distance race, though her teammates are again familiar. Her enemies are following her from one reality to another now as the boar-man and two of the killer teachers join the race. But where in hell is she going?

The truth of the matter isn't too surprising. Crossing over into a male-dominated if not male-only world, she sees herself on a poster advertising "Tag," a virtual-reality game incorporating the scenarios our heroine has survived. The decrepit inventor -- possibly a directorial self-satire? -- explains that all the characters are clones of his long-ago contemporaries: living beings who die real deaths in the game where Mitsuko is the protagonist and final girl. The other girls are slaughtered repeatedly simply to signify her peril. But all through her odyssey, the motif of falling feathers has prompted Mitsuko to question the fatedness of existence, and now she realizes that she can change the course of the game to end the cycle of destruction....

Sono is adapting another author's novel, but Tag can't help but look like a commentary on the excesses of his own work, though in that case it'd also be a case of eating your cake and having it too, indulging his violent imagination while implicitly critiquing it. For all I know, it's just another job of work for a busy filmmaker, but there's enough auteurial personality in every Sono film I've seen -- though those are relatively few -- to make me doubt that. It may still be just another movie in the sense that it marks no special milestone or turning point, but I'll need to see more of his movies before I can judge. It seems easier to see them now than it might have been fifteen or so years ago. The teachers-murdering-students bit might have made Tag taboo in the U.S. once upon a time, but in 2017 you can stream the thing on Netflix. Do so only if you have a strong stomach; the exercise in style may justify your effort.

Too Much TV: ARROW (2012-present)

On the big screen, it is a notorious fact that DC Comics and its corporate parent Warner Bros. have fallen far behind Marvel Comics and its corporate parent Disney in exploiting the full potential of its comic book universe. Despite the massive success of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, by the time Nolan was done Marvel had surged past DC and Warners, with The Avengers outgrossing The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. Worse, Nolan left DC no hooks on which to hang a universe, and so Warners had to start from scratch, with Nolan's help, with 2013's Man of Steel, and now has to wait until 2016 for a full-scale universe rollout with Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Part of the problem for DC was that their first effort to launch another movie franchise following the historic phenomenon of The Dark Knight was Martin Campbell's Green Lantern, a debacle on nearly every level made more embarrassing by Marvel's increasing success introducing relatively unfamiliar characters. As a writer and producer of Green Lantern, Greg Berlanti has a share of the blame for handicapping the DC cinematic universe. That makes it somewhat ironic that Berlanti deserves nearly all the credit for DC's dominance over Marvel on television. As of this fall he'll be personally responsible for three DC shows, out of a larger number on the air or in development, while Marvel struggles along with Agents of SHIELD. As DC continues to proliferate, Arrow's debut in Fall 2012 appears to mark a new era in genre television. A number of factors account for DC's TV success, and to date it's unclear how much Berlanti's production team really has to do with it.

One of DC's biggest advantages is actually Marvel's self-imposed handicap. Agents of SHIELD is a spinoff of Marvel's movie universe, and that automatically makes the show a kind of minor-league operation, occasionally blessed by the appearance of movie characters but limited by a presumed reluctance to "waste" Marvel's more interesting characters and concepts on television when they might make millions if not billions in movies. For DC, however, movies and television are separate universes that do not cross over. The movie Flash, for instance, will be played by someone other than Grant Gustin, who plays Flash on TV. While this disappoints some of Gustin's new fans who'd like to see him on the big screen, the benefit of separate universes is that nearly everything in DC's repertoire is available for use in both TV and movies. On Arrow, for instance, Ra's al-Ghul has emerged as a major antagonist despite being a Batman villain who figured prominently in Nolan's films, and a version of the Suicide Squad will exist parallel to the movie franchise scheduled to launch late next year. With the possible exception of Superman and Batman themselves (not counting Bruce Wayne as a child, as seen of the non-Berlanti Gotham show), everything is up for grabs in DC's TV universe. As a result, the TV universe doesn't automatically seem second rate the way Agents of SHIELD does as an appendage of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I can't say too much about SHIELD since I quit watching after the first four episodes. I'm told it's gotten much better since then, but the initial decision to base the show around original and initially uninteresting characters alienated me from the project. I couldn't help thinking that Joss Whedon & co. made up these new characters because more established characters were off-limits, while Greg Berlanti had far fewer constraints.

But if Berlanti had fewer restraints, Arrow's presence on the CW network imposed certain obligations. The CW was the home of the most successful superhero series ever, the Superman-prequel Smallville, but it's better known as a network with virtually a house genre tailored to a predominantly female audience. As with Smallville, there are more "soap opera" elements to Arrow than many male fans are comfortable with, just as there's arguably a greater preoccupation with beefcake than with cheesecake. It must have been disturbing to the still mainly male readership of DC Comics to see ads for Arrow highlighting its shirtless male stars during the show's second season. Less superficially, Arrow sets the tone for modern superhero shows by emphasizing the emotional complications and consequences of living with a secret identity, or with secrets of any sort. The necessity of a double life and its benefits for hero and loved ones alike are no longer taken for granted. Hardly an hour of Arrow goes by without characters freaking out over secrets that had been kept from them, secrets being equivalent to lies. Trust is always at stake. I'm assured that these issues really matter to female viewers, but I admit that the repetition of these themes sometimes leaves me longing for Hawksian professionalism as practiced by more grown-up characters. Ours is a less self-assured, less stoic culture, however, and in Nolan's term Arrow is arguably the hero or the show we deserve.

Arrow, of course, is based on Green Arrow, one of DC's oldest and longest-lasting characters. Created in 1941, GA was one of the few DC superheroes to be published uninterruptedly through the entire "Golden Age" of comics and into the "Silver Age" that began in the mid-1950s. The definitive form of the character didn't appear until 1969, when artist Neal Adams and writer Denny O'Neil turned Oliver Queen into a bearded radical, in attitude if not in conduct more like his ancient Robin Hood model. Berlanti's Oliver Queen bears little resemblance to that Green Arrow, but the show retains the traditional origin story in which Ollie (Stephen Amell) acquires his skills while stuck on a desert island. Since TV abhors a lone hero, however, Ollie has a number of teachers during his years on the island, most prominently Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett, playing a character borrowed from Teen Titans comics), an Australian special forces officer on a secret mission destined to become Arrow's nemesis in the second season. Arrow developed along Kung Fu lines, cross-cutting between Ollie's present-day vigilante adventures in Starling City and his younger self's struggles on the island. While the flashbacks are often thematically relevant, they also have a dramatic continuity of their own independent of Ollie's reminiscences. Since TV really abhors a lone hero, Ollie -- known initially as "the Hood" or "the Starling City Vigilante" before he settled on the show title in the second season -- gradually accumulated a little support network on top of a more extensive family than Queen had in the comics. He didn't get his traditional sidekick, Roy Harper (Colton Haynes) until late in the first season, but by that time he already had a competent wingman in erstwhile government agent and bodyguard John Diggle (David Ramsey) and a too-beautiful-to-be-true computer genius in Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards). These helpers often give Ollie moral guidance, steering him away from his early execution-style vendetta against the city's corrupt elite ("You have failed this city!" was his catchphrase) toward less ambiguous heroism dedicated to protecting rather than punishing people.

During its first two season Arrow felt like a show that was evolving in ways its creators hadn't intended, but to their joy. The most likely departure from script was the mass shipping of Ollie and Felicity -- "Ollicity" in the obnoxious jargon of shipping -- at the expense of Ollie's original love interest, Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy). The Lance name signaled that Laura was destined to become the Black Canary, Green Arrow's partner in crimefighting and romance, but only in the third season has Laurel donned that costume, inheriting it from a sister whose return from the seeming dead in the second season seemed like a delaying action until Cassidy was ready for the requirements of a heroic role. For the first two years of the show Laurel was probably its most hated character because she existed almost exclusively on a soap-opera level, and Ollicity filled the void as Rickards rose from occasional comic bit player to virtual co-star of the show. There seems to be an effort this year to undermine Ollicity now that Laurel is ready to play her destined role, but I don't care to predict how things will evolve on this front.

In any event, as an old comic book fan I watched the show for the action, which worked on a level unprecedented for TV superhero shows. The show's peak so far is the second half of the second season, when Slade Wilson (aka Deathstroke) emerged as a master villain and madman fuelled by a strength-enhancing drug and an obsession with punishing Ollie for the death of a woman Slade loved. Using a religious cult as a front, Slade built an army of superhuman killers, forcing Ollie and friends to get help from the as yet-unseen Ra's al-Ghul's League of Assassins to save Starling City from destruction from within and without as a frantic U.S. government considered extreme measures to contain Slade's army. The show has lost steam since then, and the return to prominence of the first season's Big Bad, Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman), is a troubling sign. Malcolm was the father of Ollie's best friend Tommy, who died in a Merlyn-engineered earthquake at the end of Season One, but in Season Two it was revealed during one of his brief appearances that he's also the father of Ollie's sister Thea (Willa Holland), an oft-troubled and sometimes addicted girl (whose nickname, "Speedy," was Roy Harper's in the early comics) whom Malcolm has trained to be a warrior if not a killer in his own image. Since family is very important on TV, I worry that Malcolm will be treated like family and thus become a permanent part of the show after already wearing out his welcome, despite the show's tease of a redemption arc for this mass murderer.With too much emphasis on Malcolm and Thea, Arrow could go the way of Heroes, the onetime phenomenon (now scheduled for a comeback) that grew tiresome for its refusal to move beyond its original villains and family dynamics. Arrow has never been a great show, but it has often been fun, yet it may be less fun the longer Malcolm hangs around and discourages the writers from trying new things.  There are troubling signs that they may not have had any real idea of what to do beyond the first two seasons. They're already assured of a fourth season, but they'll need to work harder than ever to deserve a fifth. That being said, Arrow's place in TV history is already assured, even if its progeny eventually surpass it.

POST MORTEM (2010)

It took a while, but I've finally seen the middle film in Pablo Larrain's trilogy of films set during the rule of General Pinochet in Chile. Post Mortem was released between Tony Manero and No, but is the first film of the trilogy chronologically, set during the coup year of 1973. It's also the most classically composed of the three films, with impressive widescreen cinematography by Sergio Armstrong. Alfredo Castro, the star of Tony Manero, again takes center stage as a somewhat more sympathetically alienated character. Mario Cornejo is a civil servant, as he always carefully identifies himself. That lends a certain dignity to his actual work as a transcriptionist of autopsies. It's hard to tell whether the morgue is the ideal setting for such a drab creature or whether the work and the proximity to death is killing something inside him. Mario is a lonely man with a crush on a dancer in a burlesque show, Nancy Puelma (Antonia Zegers) who happens to live across the street from him. He makes it his mission -- apparently he has the run of the backstage area -- to save her career when she's threatened with dismissal for getting too thin, going so far as to threaten harm to the theater if the manager doesn't keep her. His threat is pathetic; he childishly knocks over a glass display and ends up giving the manger his own car in return for Nancy keeping her job. Nancy herself is seeing other men but her own neediness responds to his.

Meanwhile, politics is building to a crisis that is at first only a nuisance to Mario and Nancy as a labor rally blocks their car one day. Politics hovers over Nancy like a cloud, however, as activists meet in her apartment, though she seems indifferent. Mario's detachment is illustrated as he takes a morning shower while explosions and other sounds of mayhem erupt across the street. Eventually he strolls over to find Nancy's home destroyed and no one but a dog in sight. Work is unusually busy today as bodies are filling the halls of the hospital, to the growing dismay of Mario and the assistant coroner Sandra (Amparo Noguera) who's attracted to him but had been rebuffed before. Later, Sandra and Mario are summoned by men in uniform to perform a very special autopsy. This scene simply can't have the same effect on non-Chileans, but anyone with a sense of history may feel the impact when the corpse Sandra dissects is identified as Salvador Allende, the freely-elected Marxist president who has been overthrown by the coup. Sandra can't bring herself to finish the work and Mario is such a bundle of nerves that he can't type properly; he uses his unfamiliarity with electric typewriters as an excuse. Later they debate whether Allende killed himself, as the new authorities claim, or was killed, as Sandra suspects.

Mario discovers that Nancy has survived by hiding in a shed. She now depends on Mario to provide her with supplies while she stays in hiding. Meanwhile the bodies continue to pile up at the hospital, and not all of them are dead. Mario discovers a victim still breathing and begging for life, and he and Sandra manage to sneak the man into one of the medical wards for treatment.  It proves a temporary reprieve. In a climactic scene Mario finds Sandra standing at the top of a stairwell littered with bodies, screaming at a soldier. Apparently the goons have gathered up suspect hospital patients and killed them, including the man Mario and Sandra had saved. As Mario watches, immobile, at the bottom of the stairs, Sandra risks her life by admitting that she had rescued the man. Luckily, the soldier only fires into the air to intimidate her. For extra measure he fires superfluous bullets into some of the corpses.

A contrast clearly forms in Mario's mind between Sandra's death-defying heroism and Nancy's hiding. The contrast grows more stark when he learns that Nancy has shared her hiding place with a lover. Mario's response is shown in a single shot that closes the picture and begs some questions. The answers depend on what you think of Nancy -- whether she deserves, for whatever reason, what she seems to get or whether Mario's act is a misdirected act of resistance to the atrocities raging around him. It could be seen as an atrocity in its own right, or as Mario's repudiation of a past no longer sustainable. Larrain sustains the ambiguity by ending the story here. If we were to see how Mario was going to behave thereafter, his attitude toward Sandra or toward the new regime, we could more certainly attach meaning to his treatment of Nancy. But Post Mortem is really about the specific moment in September 1973 and is arguably meant to raise broader questions about Chileans' behavior at the time, for which each has his or her reasons. Larrain here seemed to be working his way out of the grotesquerie that marked (or marred) Tony Manero and is absent from No, in which Alfredo Castro is not the central character. Some grotesquerie is excusable, I suppose, when portraying a grotesque moment in history, and if the ending raises more questions than it can answer, they're questions worth asking. As a whole, Larrain's trilogy is an admirable set of films that establish the Chilean as potentially a major figure, if not one already, in the wild world of cinema.

Takeshi Kitano's OUTRAGE (2010)

Takeshi Kitano is the former game-show host and comedian -- some Americans may still know him best as "Vic Romano" from Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, the freely dubbed U.S. version of the 1980s Takeshi's Castle program -- who literally became the heir to Kinji Fukasaku when the great director fell ill and was unable to finish the film Violent Cop. Already changing his image to star in the picture, Kitano (who performs as "Beat Takeshi") took over the direction and rewrote much of the script, and a star was reborn. By the end of the century Kitano was recognized as Fukasaku's heir as Japan's top director of crime films, but he also gained an arthouse following that had eluded the prior master until the end of his career, thanks to the personal aesthetic touches Kitano added to his pictures, most notably in 1997's Hana-bi ("Fireworks"). He broadened his scope in the new millennium with mixed results. His Zatoichi remake disappointed me -- he dared claim that the blind swordsman wasn't really blind! -- and subsequent films received less attention in the U.S. For a new decade Kitano returned to familiar turf with what seemed a less artistically ambitious yakuza picture, but Outrage (the Japanese title is a transliteration of the English word) is perhaps his closest work in tone to Fukasaku's heritage of yakuza cynicism. It's the sort of picture that more effectively conveys that "crime does not play" than any amount of bourgeois moralizing.

Outrage follows the now-classic yakuza formula of a more-or-less honorable man -- honorable at least according to the supposed yakuza code -- serving an unworthy boss. Beat Takeshi plays "Champ" Otomo -- with his potato face you can believe he took his lumps in the ring -- an underboss to the weasely Ikemoto (Jun Kunimura), the head of his crime family. Ikemoto is in trouble with "Mr. Chairman" (Soichiro Kitamura) because he's consorting with a boss from a rival syndicate whom Ikemoto had befriended in prison. To satisfy Mr. Chairman without violating his sworn brotherhood with Murase (Renji Ishibashi) orders Otomo to pick a fight with Murase's men, particularly Kimura (Hideo Nakano). While Ikemoto may have meant to put on a show of antagonism, things quickly spiral out of his control and the Murase family is destroyed.

 

Outrages: above, misuse of dental tools; below, the wrong tool for yakuza self-discipline.

Ikemoto is still skating on thin ice as enemies within the Sanno syndicate seek to exploit his weakness (of character, that is) while underlings like Ishihara (Ryo Kase) exploit opportunities created by the fall of Murase. Otomo is little more than a pawn for both the yakuza and Detective Kataoka (Fumiyo Kohinata), an arch-manipulator who seems to enjoy egging yakuza into killing each other, as long as someone survives to keep paying him off. As Ikemoto lives large off his minion's labors, racking up a hefty tab at the African consulate his men have turned into a casino, you can tell he's not long for this world, and while Otomo is finally just as eager as anyone to be rid of this jerk, you can also tell that he's being set up to follow not far behind his loser of a boss.

If the title means anything to Kitano, it may refer to the anger the audience is meant to feel on Otomo's behalf as everyone plays him for a goon and a sucker. The man's a brutal thug but you can't help feeling that he's doing the hard work everyone else benefits from, and you feel more certain as the film goes on that "Champ" is going to get the short end of everything. The movie's ultimate outrage is its refusal to gratify any hopes that Otomo might turn things around. You wait for him to turn the tables on all those manipulating or betraying him, but Kitano forces you to see how implausible your hopes are. Finally his best option is to turn himself in to the cops, on Kataoka's advice that "it's better to take a TKO than get knocked out." Otomo doesn't seem to have what it takes to rise to power and hold it in 21st century Japan, and as it turns out not even prison is a safe harbor for him.

Kitano was reportedly more interested in filming the violent set pieces than in any other aspect of the picture, but Outrage has the same laconic style of his early crime and cop pictures. While the violence is often spectacular, albeit on a small scale -- Otomo's attack on Murase's mouth with a dental drill is a jolting highlight -- the acting really carries the film. From Beat Takeshi's own punchy lead to Kunimura's cravenness, Kase's sinister smoothness and Kohinata's Machiavellian smugness, the director has assembled a forceful ensemble to tell his story. Outrage effectively re-establishes Kitano's mastery of the yakuza genre -- but unfortunately Kitano wasn't done. Later this week, we'll look at his sequel, a film that self-indulgently trashes most of Outrage's grim virtues. The sequel inevitably diminishes the memory of the original once you've seen it, but for now let's leave Outrage to stand alone as a superior crime film.

IP MAN 2 (2010)

Now that I've seen Wong Kar-wai's long awaited portrait of the Wing Chun master and "teacher of Bruce Lee" Ip Man, The Grandmaster, it's past time that I caught up with the Wilson Yip's sequel to his award-winning biopic from 2008. Because Wong had announced his intentions long ago, Yip's Ip Man struck some as an exploitation piece designed primarily to beat Wong to theaters, as it did by a wide margin. The awards it received suggested that Yip's picture was something more than exploitation. I found it a well-crafted, crowd-pleasing period piece influenced as much by Ron Howard's Cinderella Man in its focus on an impoverished hero as by admittedly obvious Chinese influences. If there's a Hollywood influence on Ip Man 2, I'm afraid it's something less lofty. Think Rocky IV rather than Cinderella Man -- though, admittedly, pitting kung fu heroes against foreign hulks is nothing new in Chinese cinema.

The first half of the sequel is more interesting. Yip picks up Ip Man's story in postwar Hong Kong, where our hero (Donnie Yen) struggles to make a living teaching Wing Chun to a skeptical population. Contrary to The Grandmaster, Ip's wife has made it across as well, with a baby on the way. Long days pass with nothing to do but sit and smoke and banter with the landlady on his rooftop training facility, until one young punk, Wong Leung (Huang Xiaoming) shows up to challenge the newcomer. He learns about Wing Chun the hard way, but comes back with some buddies to learn more. After Ip handles them all with ease, they become his disciples. Mrs. Ip has to gently remind him to remind them to pay regularly so they can meet the rent on both the school and their home.

 

A pensive Donnie Yen on one of Ip Man 2's atmospheric sets,

setting a poor example of discipline with that cigarette in his hand but definitely scoring period authenticity points.

Ip soon runs afoul of the Hong Kong martial arts establishment. A Hung Kuen fighter challenges Leung; his buddies dogpile the Wing Chun acolyte and take him prisoner, demanding ransom from the new master. Ip liberates Leung and routs the Hung Kuen goons, but now has to deal with their master. Master Hung (fight choreographer Sammo Hung) lays the law down; he and his peers will onl allow Ip to teach if he accepts their challenges. Once Ip has done this, humbling some of Hung's cronies and fighting the big man himself to a standstill, the law gets laid down again. Ip may have earned the right to teach, but he still better pay his dues to the martial arts association. There's often something gangsterish about martial arts schools in genre films, and that quality stands out strongly in the first half of Ip Man 2. Ip refuses to pay, but an ultimate reckoning with Master Hung is forestalled by events beyond his control.

At a low point in Ip's new career, after the Hung Kuen goons have provoked an incident leading to his eviction from his school, the film goes soft on Master Hung and the association. It reveals that the local masters have been more or less forced into a protection racket by a corrupt official of the British colonial administration who pockets the money Master Hung collects.  This official aspires to be a fight promoter of some sort, and toward that end he brings a British boxing champion, "Mr. Twister" Milo (Darren Shalavi) -- that's how his name is spelled on posters in the movie, though the subtitles call him Miller at one point. Upon his arrival, Ip Man 2 reverts to the form of the first Ip Man, pitting the hero against a foreign oppressor. The British in Hong Kong may not have been as atrocious as the Japanese on the mainland -- the Brits did most of their damage back during the Opium Wars of the 19th century -- but for Wilson Yip the essential offense is the same: foreigners are disrespecting China and its culture. Twister crashes a martial-arts exhibition staged prior to his own appearance and starts thrashing the performers, behaving more like a professional wrestler than a boxer of the period. This outrages Master Hung, who challenges him to an MMA bout on the spot. In case you were wondering, this is the Rocky IV part of the film, when the superhuman foreign beast destroys the old champion to give the hero more incentive to fight.

The film can only end one way: Ip Man vs. Twister in the center of the ring. The fight itself can only end one way, despite British efforts to rig it by changing the rules midway and forbidding Ip from throwing kicks. The fight and its cultural stakes are what separate the Ip Man films from The Grandmaster. Wong Kar-wai might well be accused of making movies mainly for the global arthouse audience, but it's clear that Wilson Yip's primary audience consists of Chinese people who want to see an arrogant gwailo humbled and their own honor upheld. The Grandmaster is introspective, using kung fu as an allegory for China coming to terms with itself during the 20th century. The Ip Man films are populist, affirming Chinese identity through victory over oppressors. The latter approach will seem distasteful to non-Chinese viewers who may see these as xenophobic films, but Wilson Yip's approach isn't necessarily artistically inferior to Wong's -- especially if we compare the two stories as martial-arts films.

While Yuen Woo-ping, The Grandmaster's fight choreographer, has made martial-arts more like superhero action ever since The Matrix,  Sammo Hung still works in the dynamic style he helped make famous as a performer in the 1980s and 1990s. The fighting in Ip Man is not that much more realistic than the fights in The Grandmaster -- the venerable Sammo relies on wirework for many of his own tricks -- but it always feels more grounded and visceral. Dare I say it: he (and Wilson Yip) treat fighting in more cinematic fashion than Yuen and Wong. In the two pure martial-arts set-pieces, as opposed to the fights with Twister, Sammo clearly thinks in terms of sight gags rather than pictorial composition, whether he's finding numerous ways for Ip to use a shipping palette as a shield or weapon or exploiting his own weight when Master Hung leaps onto a table and nearly catapaults Ip over his head. On a simpler level, Yip holds shots longer than Wong does, allowing Donnie Yen and the other fighting actors to impress us with legitimate physical skills. In many ways, Ip Man 2 is a livelier film than The Grandmaster. Martial arts may seem like the way that should make the most difference, but we should still concede that Wong's film, even in its somewhat discombobulated American form, often goes in directions more interesting than those Yip chooses, and that while Donnie Yen is not necessarily an inferior Ip Man to Tony Leung, The Grandmaster's Ziyi Zhang is easily the best performer in either film. If two films on the same subject can be an apple and orange, we have them here. To each film fan his (or her) own.

Koji Wakamatsu's CATERPILLAR (2010)

We've heard this story before: a young man marches off to war and comes back mutilated and crippled. It's the stuff of popular song and a metaphor for war's waste of youth. Inevitably the young man must seem a victim, but Koji Wakamatsu saw things differently. Caterpillar is his critical take on the maimed warrior motif, pitched somewhat closer to Johnny Got His Gun than to Born on the Fourth of July, yet closer in spirit, I dare say, to Tod Browning than to Dalton Trumbo. I have a friend who likes horror movies who found Browning's Freaks the most repulsive film he'd ever seen. I'll never show him Caterpillar.

Wakamatsu's film follows the misfortunes of Tadashi Kurokawa (Keigo Kasuya), the warrior idol of a small rural village who returns home a "war god." He's survived some terrible ordeal that cost him all his limbs as well as his hearing. Nearly half his face is scarred from burns. Given the reputed Japanese attitude toward death in battle I'm surprised the effort was made to save his life. Kurokawa was probably surprised as well. His wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima) is horrified but eventually assumes a patriotic duty of caring for him: feeding him, cleaning him, dressing him up for outings and, increasingly, servicing him sexually. However improbably, Kurokawa's manhood survived his trauma, and he comes to crave sex as much as he craves food. Through the miracle of CGI we get to see him do the deed, frequently, albeit at a distance intended to be respectful. I imagine many viewers will find it neither respectful nor distant enough, but Wakamatsu specialized in disquieting cinema and wants you to be disturbed.

 

Kurokawa, before and after

 

We're used to an unfortunate like Kurokawa learning to bemoan war, but the man's deafness, and possibly other brain damage, make such pathetic eloquence impossible. He can barely choke out single words, though an attempt to write with a pencil in his teeth indicates that he's somewhat more sentient than he looks. Shigeko reads a little of his scrawl: the subtitles translate it as "I want to do it." Suicide? Sex, more likely, or so Shigeko assumes. Kurokawa, we learn, was a domineering, violent husband when whole, but war has reduced him to a sulky, demanding invalid. But maybe he was a big spoiled baby all along.

 

The symbolism of the "war god" as an embodiment of Japan's fatal militarism is pretty blatant, but the virtue of Caterpillar isn't its political satire but its unflinching examination of the shifting dynamics of the Kurokawa marriage. Just as mutilation doesn't confer sainthood on Kurokawa, neither can we easily identify Shigeko as victim, heroine or other. On one obvious level, Japan's defeat in war and its analog in the film's village, an impoverished yet strangely idyllic place haunted by a jolly village idiot and untouched by bombing, from what we can tell, are a kind of liberation for her. At the same time, she discovers a capacity for intimate cruelty, whether she's smashing precious eggs into hubby's face or mocking him (and giving the film its name) by singing some kind of nursery rhyme as he rolls on the floor in an agony of the damned, flashing back to his rape of a Chinese woman -- referenced briefly at the start of the show -- and the ensuing fire and building collapse that ruined him. The Kurokawas are a plausibly if idiosyncratically dysfunctional couple, and Wakamatsu's gutsy portrayal of it, aided by two gutsy actors, transcends the picture's more obvious political context. Caterpillar definitely works as a satiric history play, but it works best when Wakamatsu refrains from reducing his characters to generic or sexual-political types. That creative restraint makes Caterpillar probably the best mutilated-veteran picture ever made.

Koji Wakamatsu died on October 17, aged 76, after getting hit by a taxi. He made one more film after Caterpillar, a film about Yukio Mishima that should prove one of the must-see pictures of 2013 in the U.S. Long a cult figure for his provocative "pink" films of the Sixties and Seventies, Wakamatsu seemed to hit a new stride in his eighth decade, his global profile raised by his 2007 portrait of leftist self-terrorizing, United Red Army. One suspects, or at least hopes, that his last film will reconfirm what the two prior films suggest, that Wakamatsu, tragically, died at the peak of his powers.

THE ALIEN GIRL (Chuzhaya, 2010)

Anton Bormatov's movie was panned upon its limited theatrical release in the U.S. Most reviewers saw little beyond perceived cliches and brutality, and Chuzhaya is pretty much an archetypal crime story. It's an uncomfortable mating of noir tropes and the modern gang picture as a femme fatale comes between a young thug and his Ukrainian homies. Visually, it's a jarring mix of artistic compositions and the aforementioned unglamorized brutality. I'm not sure what the reviewers wanted, since I was impressed by a picture that admittedly wasn't innovative but did strive to breathe life into crime-film archetypes in a relatively novel setting.

Crackhead Kiev crime boss Rasp -- short for Rasputin? -- sends four stooges to Prague to bring home Angela, "the alien" (Natalia Romanycheva) so she can be used as a hostage to keep her freshly-imprisoned brother from ratting on Rasp. Angela was exiled to a gypsy whorehouse, we learn later, to keep her away from investigators after her role, on Rasp's orders, in the poisoning of a group of drug-dealing Kazakh cops. If her brother doesn't talk he'll get the death penalty, and once he's dead Rasp'll probably kill Angela just to be safe. None of that matters to the four stooges -- "Kid," the leader; "Beef," the fat one; "Booger," who gets shot in a gunfight with the gypsies; and "Whiz" (Evgenii Tkachuk), the youngest and maybe the brightest of the group. The gypsies want them to pay for Angela, but Kid pays them in lead. Angela's future doesn't matter -- until she starts to work on them. Once they're down to three after leaving a bleeding Booger outside a clinic, Angela looks for someone to save her from Rasp. Whiz wins the sweepstakes; enticed by sex and a sob-story, he takes down Kid and Beef but is traumatized by doing so. Angela has to take matters into her own hands to finish them off.

Whiz is haunted by his homies, guilt-stricken by having violated the one code he knows: loyalty to his gang. He takes no comfort in his quasi-erotic idyll with Angela in an abandoned excursion boat and her talk of fleeing west to live like normal people. Finally, however, she convinces herself and Whiz that they won't be safe until they take the fight to Rasp on his own turf. The setup is almost too good to be true -- so what if it involves betraying a bodyguard already persuaded to betray his boss -- except for Whiz taking a bullet. He'll live, but he can't run, and Angela leaves him to the cops. He loses and she wins, but don't forget those loose ends....

Toward the end, the imprisoned Whiz meets Angela's brother, who explains where she got her "Alien" nickname. Turns out that she's named after the Ridley Scott movie (which Whiz, as of this 1990s-set story, has never seen), and there's a reason she's named "Alien" and not "Ripley." I can see people dismissing this picture as deeply misogynist, since it portrays Angela as a manipulative monster who destroys male camaraderie from within, but my own rule is that no one woman is all women. "Alien" is not Bormatov or his writers' portrait of an entire gender but Romanycheva does give a harrowing portrayal of survivalism taken to a sociopathic extreme that doesn't stop with Rasp's demise. Opposite her, Tkachuk is convincing as an ironically guileless (though not guiltless) thug torn between male bonds and sex drive. His best scene comes when Angela tries to explain why her brother won't rat Rasp out if Rasp has her in his power. Her explanation, of course, is that Rasp will kill her if her brother squeals, but before she can say this Whiz, still haunted and grieving over the friends he's killed or left for dead, bursts out with, "It's wrong to rat on people!" The tragedy of crime cinema, noir or not, is the struggle of lawless people to live by some code when any code is impractical, to say the least. Chuzhaya catches that ironic outrage among criminals that makes their betrayals often seem more poignant or tragic than the everyday betrayals of law-aiding life. A simplistic reading would conclude that the film blames everything on Angela, who planted the seed of betrayal in Whiz. But we ought to remember that no one is innocent in Whiz's world, and we can also question whether his thug cronies, brutes and boors all, were really more worthy of his loyalty than the alien girl.

Bormatov aspires to some pictorial grandeur in the scenes in and on the beached boat and the cinematography overall by Anastasi Mikhalov achieves effective contrasts between dark, drab and damp cityscapes and the more open emptiness of outdoor exile. But let's not overrate Chuzhaya into a neglected neo-noir classic. It's a predictable enough story of the sort we've all seen often, if not in this particular setting. The violence may grow monotonous and the tone may seem oppressively dark -- this is the sort of film in which most of the cast comes back for an encore on morgue slabs. But for fans of crime cinema interested in broadening their geographic scope I think there's something to see here.

LET THE BULLETS FLY (2010)

In 2000 the actor-director Jiang Wen premiered his World War II black comedy Devils on the Doorstep at the Cannes film festival. Despite winning a Grand Prix he found himself shut out of directing for nearly a decade, while Devils was banned by both China and Japan for its irreverent yet provocative portrayal of the two nations' conflict. Let the Bullets Fly is only Jiang's second film as a director since then, though he remained a popular actor throughout the decade. Bullets has the same darkly irreverent attitude as Devils, but in a safer and familiar context of Chinese pulp fiction. Because of the setting and the generic trappings, Bullets seems less singular a work than Devils, but distinguishes itself from other Chinese period crime films with a hard-boiled cartoonishness that makes it more like a Chinese Coen Brothers movie than Zhang Yimou's actual Blood Simple remake, A Girl, a Gun and a Noodle Shop. Having some high powered actors, including the director himself, helps further that impression.

Jiang plays Zhang Mazi ("Pockmarked" or "Pocky" Zhang), so named despite his unmarked face for reasons eventually explained. Zhang is the leader of a bandit gang in the early days of the Republic of China, circa 1920. The gang wears masks with dots denoting who's "Number One," "Number Two" and so on. This gang ambushes a train bearing a new governor, Ma Bangde (Ge You) to Goose Town. The train is derailed, to put it mildly, when it hits an axe embedded on the rail. To put it less mildly, the car flips like the truck in The Dark Knight and goes sailing over the bandits' heads. The governor and his wife survive the mayhem, but his counselor dies. Fearing for his life, Ma decides to pretend to be the counselor, telling Zhang that the dead counselor was the governor. He convinces Zhang to accompany him to Goose Town, where he'll tell the people that Zhang is, in fact, the new governor that none of them have seen before, so he can plunder the place at his leisure.

The protagonists' deceptively miraculous entry into Goose Town, where Chow Yun-Fat (below) is your friendly guide.

But someone else is already plundering Goose Town: the local crime boss Huang Fox (Chow Yun-Fat). War is inevitable as Zhang tries to assert his ersatz authority and refuses deference to the gangster. It becomes personal when Huang manipulates "Number Six" into killing himself, and it only grows more personal as more allies fall. Throughout, Huang doesn't realize that the governor is really a bandit and stages attacks on him with men wearing the gang's familiar masks in order to take the heat off himself. In the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, Zhang and Ma (who had inadvertently revealed the truth about himself under tragic circumstances) perpetuate the imposture, though Zhang can never be absolutely certain of Ma's loyalties. Episodes of violent absurdity mount until the inescapable final showdown.

Zhou Yun plays a woman who wants to be a bandit. This is her audition.

Despite all the mayhem Let the Bullets Fly is a character-driven comedy above all. It has a hard-boiled feel because Jiang films many of the key dialogue scenes involving himself, Chow and Ge in a fast-talking manner with rapid fire editing. All three are outstanding. Ge seems set up as a disreputable weasel yet proves an avid and ultimately sympathetic player in the three-way power game. Chow probably surprises his American fans with a broadly emotive performance as a criminal mastermind who probably isn't as smart as he thinks he is. He's not above lowbrow slapstick, most notably in an early scene with an idiotic body double determined to repeat everything Huang says in childish fashion. As our antihero, Jiang comes across like a Chinese Robert Mitchum, world-weary, wary and bemused all at once, cynical to his core yet sincerely feeling each loss in his circle. He lends the sometimes goofy proceedings a deadpan gravitas that somehow keeps us caring no matter how ridiculous the situation. He makes a great lord of misrule, especially when he has to remind his republican subjects at gunpoint that they musn't kneel to anyone anymore.

As a director, Jiang works on a high wire, making much of the action deliberately cartoonish while trusting himself and his co-stars to keep audiences emotionally invested in the story. Some scenes are pure slapstick, like the bit where the town's "justice drum" is cut loose from ancient vines and rolls crazily through the streets, chasing random citizens like a cartoon boulder until it crashes into a building -- and in the very next moment a body goes flying and bouncing off the drum, booted there by the local kung fu master. Later, Jiang balances pathos and black humor, making a sight gag out of the fact that a character has been blown in half by a bomb yet making the victim's death scene honestly poignant. He's never afraid to be cartoonish even in non-violent scenes like the one scored to the "Colonel Bogey" March (of Bridge on the River Kwai fame) when the three main characters make megaphone speeches to the people, Jiang terse, Chow unctuous, Ge transparently self-pitying. Cinematographer Zhao Fei makes it all as colorful as possible, in the starkest contrast with the monochrome Devils on the Doorstep, and fills the film with memorable images. Let the Bullets Fly can't help but seem less ambitious for being less controversial than Devils, but it reaffirms that Jiang Wen is a highly entertaining and imaginiative director with major potential.

ELITE SQUAD:THE ENEMY WITHIN (Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora e Outro, 2010)

Jose Padilha's sequel to his 2007 Brazilian blockbuster stands in relation to the original somewhat as Magnum Force does to Dirty Harry. Like Don Siegel's Eastwood epic, the original Tropa de Elite was accused of "fascism" in some quarters for its endorsement (if not advocacy) of uncompromising tactics in the war on street crime. Like the second Harry film, Tropa de Elite 2 appears to tell the critics, "this is what fascist cops look like," while stressing that the original hero would fight such people. Back in 2008, in one of my first reviews for this blog, I wrote that whatever its attitude toward police and crime, Elite Squad didn't feel like a fascist film; despite an apparent contempt for leftist opinion, it was too pessimistic, with too much emphasis on the essential thanklessness of the supercops' work and too little emphasis on glory and vindication. If anything, the sequel is more pessimistic, bordering on noir in its emphasis on a flawed hero's strategic error and the ruins of his personal life, while its attitude toward the left is somewhat less adversarial when you subtract personal factors. The main thing, however, is that Elite Squad 2 is a grim, hard-hitting account of a comprehensively corrupt socio-political system that may be more than one man can master.

Beto Nascimento (Wagner Moura) still hopes to master the system. The primary hero of the first film is now a colonel in the BOPE (aka the "Skulls") but is kicked upstairs after a prison riot hostage situation ends in a fiasco of a massacre of convicts. The incident proves a PR disaster because the hostage negotiator called in is Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos), a leftist professor with political ambitions who did seem to have the crisis under control before Beto's old colleague Andre Matias (Andre Ramiro)reflexively kills the lead hostage-taker. Fraga flaunts his bloodstained shirt before the TV cameras and denounces the police. For Beto, the most galling thing about the debacle is that Fraga is the stepfather of Beto's son, the husband of his ex-wife. As our representative leftist, however, Fraga is a less cartoonish figure than the student radicals from the first film. Beto's voiceover during a Fraga lecture establishes our hero's contempt for the man's beliefs, but in fact Fraga seemed to be an effective negotiator and he'll later prove Beto's most reliable ally in the struggle with the system. If anything, Beto ends the film closer to Fraga's viewpoint than to any "fascist" opinion -- but he'll always feel that "human rights" are secondary to the need to wipe out crime and corruption. And his attitude toward Fraga will remain clouded by the suspicion that his replacement is teaching his boy to hate him for what he is -- a tough cop.

When is Diogo Fraga in more trouble: when he's held at gunpoint (above)

or when Beto Nascimento is angry at him (below)?

Beto ends up with more authority over the Skulls and uses it to turn the group into a "war machine" that actually makes a major dent in the drug trade in Rio's slums. He knows that chasing the dealers away (or killing them) is only the first step in eliminating corruption. The next -- dealing with corrupt cops -- he expects to be easier.

 

Beto expects corruption to dry up when the cops no longer have dealers to pay them protection money. This is his big mistake. It turns out that by wiping out the slum drug gangs he had only eliminated the middlemen and opened the door for the corrupt cops themselves, led by the monstrous Major Rocha (Sandro Rocha) -- a minor character in the first movie -- to take over the slums as all-encompassing extortionists. Worse for Beto, Rocha and his "militias" have political cover; they can now deliver votes to the local governor and a political boss who has his own raucous TV talk show. The militias take a cut of everything, from portable cooking fuel to bootleg cable TV. For the film's purposes, they're worse than the gangs that Beto eliminated -- but for the moment (Beto narrates in retrospect, the film starting in typical modern crime-story faction with a present-day burst of violence before flashing back to four years ago) he doesn't realize what's going on.

The bad and the ugly: Major Rocha punishes a slum vendor for not paying (above) while celebrity legislator Fortunato (Andre Mattos) taunts the government on his TV show.

One neighborhood remains to be cleansed. The politicians have saved it so they can keep crime alive as an election issue. Rocha stages a robbery of a police arsenal and blames it on neighborhood gangs in order to justify a BOPE sweep, led by Andres, freshly reinstated after being thrown under the bus over the prison fiasco, but not as reliable as the militia leaders want. When his plastic-bag torture of a gang leader leads Andres to suspect that the gangs didn't do the robbery, Rocha has both Andres and the gang leader killed.

 

But nosy journalists with connections to Fraga, now a legislator, begin to piece together the truth. Following up on a loose remark by his son, who works in Fraga's office, Beto has Fraga's phone line tapped in time to hear him talk to the journalist, who has discovered evidence not just of the weapons but of the militias' political ties, just as Rocha comes down on her, assuring the writer of a gruesome fate. Having taken her phone, Rocha knows, just as Beto does, that she was talking to Fraga right up to her capture. Beto realizes that not just Fraga but his ex-wife and son are in mortal danger -- and once he makes a move to protect them, his life will also be in jeopardy....

Tropa de Elite 2 is a sweeping portrait of systematic corruption that transcends political labels. If anything, Beto's escalating confrontation with "the system" at all its levels reveals Padilha's agenda as radical rather than "fascist." The issue in either film has never been what sort of political system Brazil needs but the pressing need for root-and-branch reform. To the extent that the sequel makes that more clear and gradually sets aside the first film's superficial anti-leftist rhetoric as Beto overcomes his personal animosity and tentatively joins forces with Fraga, it's a dramatic improvement on the first Elite Squad. The fact that both Wagner Moura and Irandhir Santos give great performances, supported by a range of seedy types worthy of an American, Italian or Japanese crime saga, certainly enriches the sequel, which should be an enrichment of the original story. Beto may be an obnoxious narrator for some viewers early on, but as his misadventures open his eyes and ours Elite Squad 2 becomes a riveting thriller that renews the original's promise of a Brazilian or South American crime or cop genre to rival the benchmark work of the U.S., Japan and Italy. Here's hoping for more where that came from.