Elite Squad

Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite, 2007) is a Brazilian crime action film you can watch online on iFILM. José Padilha directs, and Wagner Moura plays a worn-out special-ops captain.

Rio de Janeiro, 1997. The Pope is coming to town and plans to sleep right beside a hillside slum run by cocaine dealers. Captain Nascimento of BOPE, the black-skull squad that storms the favelas, gets the order to clear the area before the visit. He's running on empty. His wife is pregnant, and he wants out, so he's hunting for a successor. Alongside him, two rookies join the regular police: Neto charges in headfirst, while Matias studies law at night and still believes in the rules. Both slam into the same wall of bribes, gun deals and commanders who protect the very crime they swore to fight.

Padilha didn't make a poster about brave cops. He took apart the cost of keeping order on those streets, and it stings. The picture won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and became a phenomenon at home, quoted everywhere from bootleg copies before it even opened. Nascimento's voiceover plays like a confession from a man who can no longer tell the job from the war. Stream Elite Squad (2007) online on iFILM.