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"The Berlinale's top award couldn't have gone to a worse film," I wrote back in February, when Jose Padilha's Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite) won the Golden Bear at the 58th Berlin Film Festival. The first feature film by Bus 174 director Jose Padilha, Elite Squad had already become a blockbuster sensation in its native Brazil. The hard-boiled tale of corrupt cops and ruthless drug dealers in the favelas of Rio comes across as a no-nonsense version of City of God, in which a black-uniformed military police cracks down on both sides of the ongoing drug war.

Shot in a quasi-documentary style, Padilha's roots as a non-fiction filmmaker are evident everywhere, but he fares far less well with the elements that call for the eye of a storyteller. Plot and characterization are delivered via trite voice-over, and in a misguided effort to show an objective reality, he asks us to sympathize with torturing thugs who think nothing of beating student protestors, sodomizing suspects with broomsticks, and delivering justice with a shotgun blast to the face.