Elite Squad 2: Serpico meets Charles Bronson - in the favelas

A scene from "Elite Squad: The Enemy Within"

Hell, as anyone who watched Hector Babenco's 2003 drama Carandiru knows, could hardly be more grim than a Brazilian prison. Director Jose Padiha's breathlessly paced Elite Squad: The Enemy Within plunges us into one of those teeming torture chambers in the midst of a prison riot. The opportunistic military police, watching through security cameras, debate whether to let rival cartel leaders slaughter each other before the law intervenes.

The riot turns into a potential public-relations disaster when a drug lord is shot after surrendering while a human rights negotiator looks on. The "elite squad" commander, Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), provides the voiceover play-by-play to the action and its unexpected outcome: Instead of being forced to resign, he becomes a hero to a crime-battered populace. Soon, he is promoted to the state governor's undersecretary of intelligence.

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a sequel to director Jose Padiha's 2007 Elite Squad, a blockbuster action film based on a sociological study that was criticized for its allegedly fascistic promotion of a slay-the-scum agenda. The current film attempts to remedy this fault with a wider perspective: Almost everyone is scum. The venality spreads from the slums or favelas, up the ranks of local militias, crooked police and pandering politicians.

The message obviously resonated with Brazilian moviegoers, becoming the biggest-grossing movie in the country's history, even beating out Avatar. (Padiha has been hired by Hollywood to do a Robocop remake.)

Though comparable in content to Sidney Lumet's two major New York police corruption films – Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981), Elite Squad is more in the primitive-but-effective spirit of a Charles Bronson revenge flick, with characters as cardboard as cutouts on a firing range.

The Captain's primary object of contempt is leftist intellectual Fraga (Irandhir Santos), the human-rights negotiator from the opening sequence.

In early scenes, we see Fraga lecturing to his university class, demonstrating that, if current incarceration rates continue, in 50 years Brazil will have more people in jail than out. For a jaded policeman like Nascimento, that would be fine. What particularly galls him is that Fraga is married to Nascimento's former wife, Rosane (Maria Ribeiro), and is stepfather to the cop's son.

Nascimento watches in dismay as his teenaged boy, Rafael (Pedro Van-Held) adopts his stepfather's non-violent ways.

"To people like me," explains Nascimento, "war is medicine."

In his new job, Nascimento gets an invigorating dose of his favourite stimulant. He scores a series of successes, leading a sweep against the drug trade, with armed helicopters skimming over the rooftops, guiding the street-level raids.

But the power vacuum he creates leads to unintended consequences as crooked police, led by the brutal Major Rocha (Sandro Rocha) and supported by the governor, take over where the criminals left off, finding new ways of extorting money from the slum dwellers. An improbable, if dramatically satisfying conclusion sees the tough, honest cop and the idealist intellectual join forces.

Like many antiwar movies, Elite Squad revels in what it reviles and is designed to appeal to both the intellectual Fagas and the visceral Nascimento. You can see that Padiha's natural sympathies are with the primitive cop, but give him credit for forcing his audience to stretch: Elite Squad is just urgent and complex enough to make it clear violence is more than a matter for academic debate.

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within