This may be seen as a post-Elite Squad movie. It is well acted, well directed and well edited. It follows a difficult strategy, which I am not fully convinced about, but that is somewhat ambitious anyway. When it comes to Brazilian (and particularly Rio de Janeiro) military police, and the "war on drugs", and the lack of human rights in slums, there is a fierce polarization between condescendent defenders of law enforcement agents who consider the death of poor people in armed operations as tolerable side effects, and those who are very critical to vicious military police and see each policeman as an racist criminal. The script tried (I am not sure it it was fully successful, but I noticed such attempt) to overcome that polarization, engaging itself in a multilayered exploration of the problem: it both presents the absurd illegal way the police deals with local denizens (perhaps not enough explicitly) and the strong pressures a well-intentioned policeman face in that dangerous situation caused by the lack of a socially fair society and the state priority of pushing lower class people to repress and kill poor people (either as lethal mistakes, or as self defence or as criminal summary execution). There is not an attempt of interpretation of policemen (or of a segment of the police, such as the BOPE as depicted in Elite Squad film) as heroes or anti-heroes, but as diverse and contradictory human beings who try to survive, who take good or bad decisions under pressure and psychological stress, who both help the others or de-humanize them. Off course there are problems, such as a certain support of a view that Justice is too loose on criminals and that the press does not behave well when denounces police crimes, but I believe that the movie counterbalanced these drawbacks with scenes where social political critic qas present.
