Slick and Annoying MTV Favela movie

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2004)

This movie proves that foreign directors are perfectly capable of putting out soulless Hollywood crap too. This movie has nothing to say about Brazil, nothing to say about the rise of crime in Rio's shantytowns, and ultimately nothing to say about any of its characters. And to make things even worse, it ruins almost every dramatic scene by applying utterly pointless fastmo/stop sequences, the should-be-banned-forever shakycam, and the super-annoying fastcut MTV style edits that not only suck, but are hopelessly dated. The only people this movie will impress are film-critics and Tarantino-wannabes.
I won't waste your time with the story since you've seen it in about 100 movies before this one. Nothing intrinsically wrong with telling a boys from the hood gangster story, but its just not in and of itself strong enough to carry the movie. Lil'Dice grows up to be a big boss then gets killed. Yawn. Rocket escapes poverty (I guess) by becoming a reporter. Snore. A bunch of other guys get killed before we have any chance to figure out who they are. Zzzzzz.
The music is buried in the background for the most part, and when it takes center stage, it's often stuff like "Kung Fu Fighting" which sounds more like Hollywood shorthand for "the 70s" than any real attempt to capture what favela kids were listening to back then. I swear it feels like this movie was scored by an American right down to the rustic types playing their little guitars on the street.
The acting is fine but can't escape the one-dimensional writing. The Tender Trio are amiable thugs whose roles in this movie are completely superfluous. Lil Dice is 100% bad, Rocket is 100% good, and Benny is so underwritten that we don't really care what, if anything, motivates him. The one character who might have acquired some depth (and around whom the entire movie should have been built) is Knockout Ned, a bus driver who turns into a murderous gangster. He, more than anyone else in this movie, embodies everything that went wrong in the favelas in the 80s--a deadly combination of ex-military and drug gangsters, with the military guys supplying the connections for heavy firearms, the organization to mold the drug warlords armies, and the training to shoot to kill rather than simply spray bullets around. Knockout Ned is portrayed as a "hero" of course, even though so many of his kind were anything but heros, taking advantage (and often creating) the total anarchy of the favelas in order to grow rich and powerful.
The cinematography often makes this film all but unwatchable. Fast cuts, speedups, filter shots, the abysmal strobe-light sequence on the dancefloor. All of this is crap and totally kills every scene where its employed. The one great scene in this movie (where Lil Dice shoots one of the "runts" in the foot, then forces another young kid to decide which of the two "runts" to kill) is devastatingly effective because it doesn't use any crap film tricks at all. It's a tense, realistically portrayed scene shot at medium distance which manages in a few minutes to show just how the mindlessly violent generation of the 90s came into being. If the whole movie had been like this, it would have earned all the critical praise heaped on it.
But of course, the whole movie isn't like this because the director is too busy showing off his technique to worry much about how the scenes connect. Copying Tarantino's style of putting little titles up for each segment, he seems to utterly forget what story he's telling, jumping around from character to character, and even short flashback loops like the whole "apartment" sequence that he seems to think build dramatic tension whereas all they really do is shout "hey, look at how cool this narrative technique is!" It might be cooler if we hadn't seen the same "Lil Dice takes over another dealer's turf" sequences so many other places. And all the praise about how "realistic" this is must be coming from critics who think Quentin's films are realistic because almost all the violence is as perfunctory and fake as any movie coming out of Hollywood these days. In the end, this feels as plastic and stylized as any gangster rock video, and carries the same emotional weight.
In short, a real disappointment. Essentially a tired American gangsters from the hood movie shot with a Brazilian setting.