I've been trying to think of what I will be referring to this as in the future and I think City of God II : The Berlinale Files has a nice ring to it. This just won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival ... and I have no idea why. It's basically, if I were pitching it, Serpico meets Full Metal Jacket, done like City of God. Now, I loathed City of God, I thought it was very well made but the inherent misogyny and glorification were just anathema to my sensibilites. This is the other way round, it's a bit of a hack job because it tries to use the same style but has none of the brio or vibrancy of Meirelles's storytelling but there's more weight to the story.

The problem is though, the story at times is laughable. We open the film with policemen going into the slums to collect a pay-off from drug dealers. Two straight cops are following them and end up shooting someone - all hell breaks loose. Here is the script from that point :

"Go f--k yourself dude!"
"No one invades the hood, bitch!"
"Wanna mess with us, motherf--kers?"
"We'll f--king kill you!"

- A chase ensues

"Oh s--t, we're screwed!"

- Finally the cops are cornered

"F--k!"
"We're going to die, man!"
"DUDE! We're going to die!"
"Keep shooting, bro!"
"Oh s--t!"
"F--k! we're f--ked! Dude!"
"We're going to die, man!"
"No compadre, stay calm would you?"

As you can see, this is so laughable it's as if it was a 14 year old boy's attempt at dialogue after buying his first hoodie. This is the trouble, the film then goes back and for the next hour tells you everything up til that point (the Serpico section) then afterwards goes into BOPE (the special section of the military police) training and beyond (which is the Full Metal Jacket part of the film), but there are frequently hilarious moments stemming from the awful writing. The training sequences in Full Metal Jacket were really funny because you laughed along with R. Lee Ermey because how he was belittling the trainees was so amusing. This though, rather than laughing with, you laugh at because it's just so pathetic.

The basic set up is that BOPE Captain Nascimento is leaving the job due to stress and he has to get a replacement. The two most likely trainees are Neto and Matias, one having the feel for the streets, the other the intelligence. What it ends up being is a portrait of the decline of character in doing the job. At one point in the training Nascimento exclaims "In order to wear this skull you need to have some character" - oh that the screenwriter had heeded the advice of the lines he wrote. That's because if that's where you're going with it (and that is ultimately the point of the film) then you HAVE to show detailed character throughout the film and frankly he doesn't do that. All we know about Matias is he doesn't know if he wants to be a lawyer or a cop, he has a poorly drawn relationship with a girl (played by Fernanda Machado, the only bright part of a consistently dull cast), is "honourable", then situations lead him to be less so. It doesn't help that the acting is barely competent and can't add any nuance to what's not there on paper, but it's very fragmented and not a well constructed arc.

So this is a sort of freak show - it has delusions of grandeur yet is a hack job, it has pretensions of importance but is risible - but it's so amusingly crap it's actually consistently entertaining so I can't give it a throroughly bad write up. It's trash, but fun trash because you can laugh at it so much. It has none of the undesirable over and undertones of the film it aspires to emulate, but none of the zest or originality.  The acting, bar Machado, is uniformly poor and the narrative not particularly interesting but it does talk a good game, it is on an interesting subject (corruption, primarily the general police, but eventually individual moral). This is a so bad it's (almost in the realm of being) good film and I think it's hilarious it won the Golden Bear. It's *just* about recommended, its target audience is guys under 30 and I cannot imagine anyone else being into it unless they really, really liked City of God to the degree they don't mind the bastardisation of it.