City of God film review

'City of God' is full of action, but no soul

Maybe I've seen too many fashion spreads of models flown to exotic locales, lusciously draped over some anonymous local, and photographed to plug couture swimsuits. But, darn, if the irritating new gangsta opera ''City of God'' doesn't feel like a particularly grisly layout for Vogue - only, minus the beauties.

Set in an arid and packed favela of Rio de Janeiro called City of God, the film spans three decades and an extreme body count whose tally rises while your blood pressure is likely to stall. I don't mean to sound blase or to suggest that if you've seen one pack of young derelict hoods try to assassinate another, you've seen them all. But there's something distasteful in the rote way this film introduces us to two dozen hapless, heartless kids and doesn't care enough to make us feel for them. It would rather doll up the slum and memorialize the trigger-happy thugs infesting it.

The director Fernando Meirelles used to make commercials in his native Brazil, and playing exclusively to those instincts, he's more psyched about what his camera and editor can do than how his actors, most of them first-timers, can affect us. To wit, he's impressed with that increasingly expressionless ''Matrix'' shot - the one where the camera rotates around a character while time stands still. The moment comes early and is designed to point only to the fact that the remaining two hours will be packed to the gills with nothing but verve.

Incidentally, the eye of that optical storm is a young photographer named Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues). He's nearly caught in the crossfire between two gangs and the cops. But before the movie unleashes its mayhem, Rocket - our narrator and Meirelles's stand-in - whisks us back to what we're told is the '60s. Rocket's older brother and two of his friends run around the city waving guns, robbing, pushing up on girls. But it's their young charge, L'il Dice (the scarily good Douglas Silva), whom you should fear.

As a 10-year-old, he's the mannish crime visionary who shot Rocket's brother. As a teenager in the '70s, he's a self-aggrandizing, drug-dealing killing machine who has rechristened himself L'il Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora), blowing people away as a matter of fact. By the '80s. he has started a cartel that basically controls the City of God's underworld.

The guy's got a lot on his mind. He's defending his empire against both a gang of somehow more dangerous baby thugs and a guy called Knockaround Ned (Seu Jorge) whose girl Ze raped and whose family Ze slaughtered. By the time we're treated to that, the film has been doused with enough sweat and adrenaline to make a machismo cocktail, which Meirelles serves with a little paper umbrella. For every truly horrifying scene (one in which Ze forces a young bandit to shoot a buddy comes to mind), there's another of touristic splendor, usually starring Rocket.

Meirelles made the picture with the help of Katia Lund, a documentary filmmaker. Presumably, she was brought on to keep the grains of truth from slipping between his fingers. And ''City of God'' is better than the pitying movies we usually get about the Latin poor, like David Riker's 1998 ''La Ciudad.'' Yet the film so expertly brandishes its pulp influences (''GoodFellas,'' ''Pulp Fiction,'' ''Amores Perros'') and ignores its forefathers (namely Luis Bunuel's ''Los Olvidados''), you're forced to wonder if its creators believe anything is happening in the actual ghettos of Brazil.

If there's an indictment here, it never surfaces. Taken from a Paulo Lins novel and based on a true story (as the film is happy to boast at its conclusion), the film sensualizes the violence cycle and makes a fetish of poverty. What ought to be devastating and tragic about ''City of God'' is discomfiting in its offhandedness. This isn't a movie; it's a soulless pictorial.