Intervenção, É Proibido Morrer

Fabulous, but you have to prepare your heart for the avalanche of feelings in the face of stark reality... It makes us question, especially for me because I tend to be leftist, for civil rights, social assistance and the like, and in the midst of this analysis coincidentally this week the federal highway police murdered, asphyxiated in the van, like a Nazi gas chamber, a disabled man for not wearing a helmet... Tense... Tense and intense... An incredible and realistic national production...

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.

The film is based on the real situation of the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro. To those who live in Rio, it is more like watching the news than a movie. This is the depressing life of the policemen and slum comunity. If only the State could understand the message... The problem is: the State does not have the power to fight drug trafficking, because the State created it ! It should have been fought decades ago. Now, neither the police or the politicians have the power to fight crime in Rio.

Please bear in mind that Elite Squad is the best movie ever written, produced and distributed in Brazilian history. It's the standard that teachers should use to teach Acting anywhere in college. It's the ultimate masterpiece of Latin movie.

Given that success, the format is often copied by other titles trying to gauge on the success attained by Elite Squad to drive viewers to new ticket sales. This title fails to do that. Acting is very weak, the story itself is very simple and the outcome is unrealistic. It lacks the conceptual presence that previous movies had, connecting with real cops to narrate a history that is not too much Hollywoodian but actually connected to Rio's day to day reality.