General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (Portuguese: Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora É Outro) is a 2010 Brazilian crime-political film directed by José Padilha and the sequel to Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite, 2007). Wagner Moura returns as Roberto Nascimento, now a colonel who has risen from BOPE commander to a government intelligence post, where he discovers that militias and corrupt politicians, not drug traffickers, are the system's real beneficiaries.¹^•² Released in Brazil on 8 October 2010, it sold 11,146,723 tickets and grossed R$103,461,153.74, becoming the most-watched Brazilian film of all time at the time and the highest-grossing Brazilian title in Brazil between 2009 and 2015.³^•⁴^•⁵^•¹⁵

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora É Outro; English release title Elite Squad: The Enemy Within³^•⁶
Brazilian release	8 October 2010, distributed by Zazen/RioFilme³
Director and writers	Directed by José Padilha; screenplay by Padilha, Bráulio Mantovani, and Rodrigo Pimentel¹
Lead cast	Wagner Moura (Nascimento), Irandhir Santos (Fraga), André Ramiro (Mathias), Maria Ribeiro (Rosane), Milhem Cortaz (Fábio), Seu Jorge (Beirada)¹
Box office	11,146,723 admissions and R$103,461,153.74 in Brazil; US$63,027,681 worldwide⁴^•⁷
Record	Most-watched Brazilian film of all time on release, surpassing Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (10.73 million since 1976)⁵
Runtime and rating	115–116 minutes; rated 16 years in Brazil³^•¹

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The story takes place more than ten years after the first film and follows the maturing of Nascimento, who after a failed operation is removed from command of BOPE (the Rio de Janeiro military police's Special Police Operations Battalion) and becomes Sub-Secretary of Intelligence in the state's Secretariat of Public Security.² In this post he strengthens BOPE and pushes the drug trade out of many favelas, only to find that the system has adapted: corrupt police and politicians with electoral interests learn to profit without the traffickers as intermediaries.¹^•⁸

Pursuing this trail, Nascimento goes beyond the barracks and exposes the links between the militias and the state itself, at a high personal price.¹ His private life is strained in parallel: his son Rafael has become a teenager, Rosane is no longer his wife, and his old adversary Fraga (Irandhir Santos) now holds a prominent place within his family.⁹ The subtitle states the film's thesis directly: the enemy is now another.¹

Production

Padilha and screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani built the story from intensive research, mixing real events with the fictional history of Nascimento, his family, and his friends in order to speak about the reality of Brazil through cinema.¹ Padilha and producer Marcos Prado worked with practically the same crew and cast as the first film.¹ Production companies were Zazen Produções Audiovisuais with Globo Filmes, Feijão Filmes, and Riofilme; Lula Carvalho was cinematographer, Daniel Rezende the editor, and Pedro Bromfman composed the score.⁸

Box office record

The film set the record for the biggest opening for a Brazilian film since the Retomada (the revival of Brazilian commercial cinema in the mid-1990s), and on 7 December 2010 it passed Dona Flor e seus dois maridos to become the highest-grossing Brazilian film in history, with 10,736,995 spectators at that point while still in theaters in its ninth week.¹⁰ ANCINE's statistical yearbook records a final accumulated audience of 11,146,723 on 733 screens at release, with gross revenue of R$103,461,153.74, ranking it first among Brazilian titles released in Brazil from 2009 to 2015, and ahead of The Avengers, which grossed R$129,595,590, in admissions.⁴^•¹⁵ It was also the most profitable film released in Brazil in 2010, beating Avatar.¹¹ Worldwide, the film grossed US$63,027,681.⁷

Reception and awards

The film won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography at the 2011 Grande Prêmio do Cinema Brasileiro, and took Best Direction, Best Editing, and a Special Jury Prize at the 2011 Havana Film Festival, along with ACIE awards for Best Film, Photography, Actor, and Screenplay.¹ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 91% Tomatometer from 47 reviews, with a critics consensus describing it as "a bleak, violent descent into the Brazilian underbelly".⁶ The Guardian's Xan Brooks, a film critic for the British newspaper, wrote that the sequel "moves from the micro to the macro", following the promoted captain into a corrupt tangle of drug dealers, cops, and politicians.¹²

Unlike its predecessor, which had been accused in parts of the Brazilian press of being fascist, the sequel generated far less controversy on release; academic commentary notes that its enormous audience owed much to the polemical success of the first film, while the sequel itself did not provoke the same wave of criticism.⁵

Themes and international circulation

Where the first film concentrated on BOPE's routine and the fight against drug trafficking, the sequel shifts the conflict to the relationship between public security, corruption, electoral politics, and the militias, paramilitary groups that control territory and connect to the state.¹³ The film was released in China in 2011 under the title 精英部队2：大敌当前, and later circulated on Chinese streaming platforms Youku (via an indirect translation through English) and Bilibili (a direct translation from Portuguese, 2022), a case studied in audiovisual translation research.¹⁴ In the United States it opened on 11 November 2011 through distributor Variance Films.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Franchise and series entries as standalone works › Action, thriller, and crime series film entries › Entries released in the 2010s › Crime and heist entries

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?