Review: City of Men (2/5)

City of Men
(Paulo Morelli):
Douglas Silva, Darlan Cunha, Jonathan Haagensen, Rodrigo Dos Santos.
Running time: 111 minutes.

This companion piece to 2002’s Brazilian firecracker City of God is a slum gangster movie cooked up in similar fashion. Fernando Meirilles’ film was about boys forced to be men; here it is about men who only know how to be boys. It’s set in another favela controlled by gun-toting youngsters, with a couple of innocents, turning 18, caught in the melee. The heroes are lifelong friends, Wallace (Darlan Cunha) and Ace (Douglas Silva) both of whom are fatherless; indeed, the film is keen to illustrate the problems caused by so many absent dads. Director Paulo Morelli shows how easy it is for Ace to slip into neglect, forgetting his infant on the beach as he heads off on a distraction. Everyone needs a father, which is fair enough, but it is only one piece of Brazil’s complex problems. Director Morelli guides us through the story with fluid steadycam, though he can’t make up his mind whether to damn the affair or make it look sexy. Neither can he muster the kinetic spark of Meirilles’ classic: he sets the pace at langourous, like the heat. But it soon sags. And the drama limps: the pulse of City of God was how those youngsters navigated from childhood to crime or escape. By the time we meet the heroes here, they’ve made their moral choices. The film tries to draw them in, but I wasn’t convinced.