Before the movie began, I had wondered if it was based on true events. At the end (or was it the beginning?) there was that familiar line of text, “Based on a true story” or some variant of that. Doing a quick Wikipedia search right now reveals that the film is loosely based on true events. However, if the depiction of the level of violence is accurate, I’d be unpleasantly surprised. As the violence began ramping up in the film, I was reminded of reading online about the violence in Brazil (I’ve read grisly mentions of LiveLeak videos from Brazil, I’d recommend not Googling them). I couldn’t imagine living happily in a place like the film depicts.

One thing I found very interesting is how the most powerful gang leader in the city (Little Z) was depicted as being respected and even liked by the locals. Even though him and his gang peddled drugs and murdered, it seemed the people in the city gave more weight to the fact that he seemingly beneficently established rules that rape and robbery would not be tolerated in his “territory”. Perhaps because this kind of semi-organized crime is so normalized at this point in places like the city depicted in the film, people in these places just accept these crime lords and learn to look at them somewhat favorably.

This may seem an odd thing to focus on, but it stuck out to me because of a memory I have from Spanish class in high school. I lived in the southern tip of Texas in a city that shares a border with Mexico, where the majority of the population is Hispanic. Nearly everyone spoke Spanish, so the Spanish classes were not taken seriously at all, by neither the students nor the teachers. I ended up with an A in Spanish 1, 2, and 3, and I somehow don’t know how to speak Spanish. One distinct memory I have from Spanish class is when one day our teacher was talking about some iconic drug lord who was still at large in Mexico at the time. She related stories she’d heard of how he would appear unannounced in restaurants to have a meal. His goons would go around and collect everyone’s phones so that no one could call the police, and no one could leave while he was eating. After he was finished, people’s phones were returned and he would reportedly pay for the meals of everyone in the restaurant before leaving. The way she spoke of him stuck in my head, and I think of it every now and then. To me it seemed that she was actually praising him, and it seemed that other students shared her sentiment as they chimed in with their own stories of how magnanimous this guy was. I was appalled, and I was reminded of this as I was watching the film. GRF Tyler shared a Facebook post of a quote from a Brazilian man who grew up in a city like the one in the film, and even that gave off the vibe that the people in his city actually seemed to respect their crime lord for the little good that he did.