Voiceover. For film-makers everywhere it can be a formal lifeline that represents the difference between abject failure and narrative coherence. In some movies, such as Trainspotting, it is both a poetic boon and a crucial expository tool. In others, such as the studio cut of Blade Runner, it is flat and superfluous. In others still, such as José Padilha’s new Brazilian cop drama Elite Squad, it is just plain wrong.

The movie, about life inside the world of Rio de Janeiro’s lethal supercop BOPE squad (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), is narrated by the alpha-male protagonist Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) with all the gruff urgency of an angry gorilla. “Me? I’m no regular cop!” he barks, before his screen self blasts a teenage drug dealer through a shanty shack in Rio’s dirt-poor favelas. “To me, a dealer is a dealer!” he continues, as he returns home to his wife, yells at her a lot, shoots some more teenagers and beats an imminent nervous breakdown through the power of machismo alone.

Nascimento’s penchant for Rambo theatrics is unfortunate, because elsewhere Elite Squad has interesting things to say. Co-written by a former BOPE officer, it is, for instance, a riposte to the duplicitous liberalism of movies such as City of God, which purport to examine slum life in the favelas but are equally hopped up on guns and violence. Padilha’s film, instead, features a smart central scene in which the undercover BOPE cop Matias (Andre Ramiro) debates the nature of street crime with rich college students who cling to specious quotes from the philosopher Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

Soon, however, the movie leaps back into macho-land, and Nascimento’s voiceover growls: “Those college kids! They just didn’t get it!” Underneath, the narrative lurches from Matias’s pre-BOPE rookie days to his gruelling training, and eventually to his homicidal assignments with Nascimento. During these final sequences, where favela teens are gleefully tortured and where splintered broom-handles are aimed into rectums, the movie and Nascimento’s voiceover blend into one cacophonous mess. The chest-thumping growl is uppermost. Killing with impunity is everything. And all subtlety is lost.

18, 115 minutes

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