Review of Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within

I think that the main difference between this film and its predecessor is the message you're left with. The 1st film allows you to believe that there is hope in spite of all the chaos surrounding us, beauty behind destruction, as it was. The 2nd one unceremoniously rips that away with a disconcerting violence. It leaves us bereft… At least that's how I felt throughout a great part of it, especially towards the middle to end. The chaos is left to act of its own accord, and it's a downward spiral toward a cage from which there is no possible escape. Conform to the rules of the system or be killed rebelling against it. Our knowledge of others is usually one of rehearsed insipidness and persiflage. Immersion into the surface turns out to be much more revealing than could ever have been predicted. Truly, the poor are the mass, they hold the collective political power, and yet do not (cannot) hold this power with an iron fist because they are too weak and ignorant to understand it, a position forced upon them by the unremitting circumstances society holds them in (I remember visiting portions of a slum in which the people there never had their births registered, they essentially did not exist, apart from having no idea at all about caring for basic needs, like brushing their teeth). Thus, their deplorable condition of living in misery and desperately wanting to be hauled out of the darkness is exploited by the police and politicians. In this ever-expanding social pyramid, in which the rich are fattening themselves up at the top, the poor at its base begin to sink further into the mud until there is no breathing room. The director and screenwriters offer up a devastating view of social reality, leaving the adage that "you can't trust anyone" as the only unquestionable truth. The absolute irony behind this sequel is that Capt. Nascimento, toted as a nefarious fascist villain in the 1st movie, turns into the antithesis of evil here… suddenly his past history of leading death squads and torture festivals is swept under the rug and he is redeemed, reborn. He is the only one the audience can cling to in the midst of the despair being portrayed. He is symbolically "relied upon" to keep us safe in this world in which the laws we've become dependent on to live our lives in a safe way have started to disintegrate right before our eyes, leaving us groundless and vulnerable. How to respond to a feeling of vulnerability? Primary process world, aka aggression and sex… The 2nd isn't much of an option, since we're channeling this by proxy. What's left to do is murder the destabilizing forces and reestablish a sense of order (as tenuous and illusory as it may be). The sequence in the final third of the film makes one thing clear: the reality became too much for the makers of this film to handle, they needed to eventually shy away from the sewage they were focusing on… it can become overwhelming to not shine a nightlight of hope into the void, and that is what is done when Nascimento takes on this superhero role and vanquishes evil… even though his efforts are then swallowed up by the amorphous blob of chaos so the latter could continue with its carnage, this little storyline shows the director felt we all needed a reprieve, him and us. It would've been much more raw and realistic for there to have been a different outcome for Nascimento, but I can only imagine the gaping wound this would have left in its viewers, for at that point I was already filled with despair, but was "granted" the chance to remount my defenses to a more comfortable degree. I loved this film, it's right up there with the first, and I have to say that the main character is on the fast track to becoming a Brazilian cultural icon (more so than he already was), the ruthlessly destructive force that people have been left with no choice but to mirror themselves on.