Weeks after City Of Men showed young men needing armed protection in order to make a trip to the beach, Brazil's tourist board takes another body blow with this melodrama about Brazil's Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE) as they prepare to lo
ck down a Rio slum where the Pope wants to stay on his visit in 1997. Created as an antidote to the favelas' gang culture of crime and extortion, these elite cops come across like a squad of Dirty Harrys, meting out their own vigilante justice. Aggressively impatient with liberals, who are either desperately naive or grossly hypocritical in their own recreational drug use, these paramilitary forces have been let loose because the regular police force is rife with corruption, taking kickbacks from strip clubs and selling back seized guns to the gangs.
The film's lead character is hard-nosed, stressed-out BOPE Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura, above), who is weeks away from the birth of his first child. Keen to find a less dangerous occupation, he is searching for someone to replace him so that he can quit the force. The two main candidates are Neto (Caio Junqueira), a trigger-happy thug, and Matias (André Ramiro), whose main drawback is his idealistic interest in law school.
Director Jose Padilha's picture is part sweaty war film, part shrewd documentary, part unauthorised and relocated adaptation of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. At its best, the movie functions as an obvious flip-side companion piece to Fernando Merielles' City Of God, although its message is less introspective, more simplistic and clumsy in its execution. At its worst, there's the film's chuntering voiceover and a heavy-duty bootcamp for our two wannabes that conjures up memories of relentless Lou Gossett Jr bullying Richard Gere in An Officer And A Gentleman.
THE FOX AND THE CHILD (U)
**French director Luc Jacquet, who explored Disney territory two ye ars ago with family-friendly March Of The Penguins, returns for another animal adventure, where wildlife footage is wrapped with a yarn about a winsome French child (Bertille Noel-Bruneau), who finds a cute fox cub foraging for food on her way home from school and tries to approach it. Eventually the pair become friends, but things go awry when the girl tries to tame the wild animal.
Narrated by Kate Winslet in a style that is fairly anthropomorphic, but not sickeningly so, the film follows the vixen from adolescent to single mother, although it never mentions whether foxes mate for life or if the older foxes have midlife crises and just want to keep pairing off with hot young things.
Even at 92 minutes, the story feels stretched, and younger kids and older parents may find themselves nodding off in sympathy as foxes, hedgehogs and bears enjoy low-calorie escapades. Still, it's refreshing to see an animal movie in which the animals don't talk, sing or cooperate in the marketing of fast-food restaurants even though city dwellers, whose experience of fox sightings are a rarity on a par with spotting a Starbucks, may be less charmed.
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On general release from FridayThe full article contains 529 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
