Fresh and Exciting

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It's the Dead End Hill slums in Rio de Janeiro. Best friends Acerola and Laranjinha are turning 18 growing up without fathers. Orphan Acerola helps Laranjinha discover his father in prison who is on the verge of being paroled. Acerola's wife leaves him with his son Clayton. Then babysitter Cris leaves and he is angry to do the work of a mother. Meanwhile the gangs are ramping up the conflicts and betrayal as the hills descend into all out war.I don't see the characters that compelling. None of them intrigue me. I don't really care about them. This is often compared to "City of God" due to some of the same actors. While it takes place in the same slums, the tension feels manufactured. It's got more action but it doesn't have the same grittiness. Something seems to be sanitized or beautified. It's great to return to these places but it's not quite the same.

The Rio de Janeiro landscape is nothing if not dramatic. The topography of the sprawling metropolis seems to be entirely in tune with the eclectic urban population that call it home. Pointed mountains are peppered across the landscape, and in a city where real estate struggles to meet the demands of overpopulation, many of their slopes have been cannibalized for residence. In many cases, they stand as monuments to Rio's enormous economic divide, being given over to crumbling, haphazard shanty towns known locally as 'favelas', often no-go areas for the authorities and the dominions therefore for the self-imposed fiefdoms of street gangs. In 'City Of Men', the audience is given a window into the lives of these would-be rulers and the struggling locals unfortunate enough to be caught up in their affairs.The wider storyline, taking place primarily on the marvellously-subtle 'Dead End Hill', concerns a power struggle between gang leader Madrugadao (translated as 'Midnight' in my subtitles), disgruntled members of his group and rival gangs on nearby hills with plans to take over his territory. Caught in the middle of all this are the film's two lead characters, Acerola and Laranjinha, friends since childhood and now facing the burdens of adulthood. Driven by a shared quest to find out the identity of their long-lost fathers, they discover that the past is sometimes better left buried. The drama brings into sharp focus the personal tragedies inevitable in such an environment: children with no future drawn into gangs, the almost-impossible struggle to raise a family, and the ever-present spectre of death in a world ruled by jungle law. Yet through the close bond forged between the two friends, the fragile flames of friendship and loyalty may be just enough to help them escape the chaos.One of 'City Of Men's strongest assets is its visual authenticity, having been shot at least partially on location at a genuine shanty town, which communicates the desperation and poverty of the world its characters inhabit with instant verisimilitude and sadness. The winding narrow streets stretching up Dead End Hill (or 'Morro da Sinuca' in the original) cut through faded blocks of sloppily-bonded iron and brick, inside which the simple and aged cheap detritus of the population offer silent indication as to the tiny fortunes and aspirations of each individual. The hill is a world apart from the wealth and stability far below, as though natural geography itself has drawn the line between them. Despite its dilapidated state and the aura of human misery, even this corner of the city manages to be picturesque. Cinematographer Adriano Goldman has striven to capture every angle of this world in all its mottled shades and succeeded brilliantly.Robust too is the acting. Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha as Acerola and Laranjinha respectively, do not fail to convince as the two orphans thrust together by hardship and circumstance, inhabiting their characters with ease. So too do the rest of the cast, and also notable is Pedro Henrique as Caju, the glory-seeking youth unwaveringly keen to do his bit for Dead End Hill and not at all fazed by his first firearm.It was not until after viewing the film that I learned 'City Of Men' is actually the concluding chapter to the popular Brazilian television series of the same name, in which we see the aforementioned characters presented here at an earlier time in their lives. Indeed, the film often flashes back to scenes from the series in order to establish the longstanding friendship between the two leads. It is not, in addition, connected to the more famous exploration along similar themes, 'City Of God', which apparently sets many up for disappointment. 'City Of Men', it turns out, is the concluding chapter to the series, with a built-in audience of fans who have travelled with the cast for several years.Which is doubtless the ideal way to approach the film, for taken on its own without any background knowledge or emotion invested in the characters, 'City Of Men' offers little in the way of original storytelling, being ultimately a fairly straightforward gangster drama with a fairly predictable ending. While its wonderfully-captured visuals have left a lasting impression with me, the unremarkable plot already fades into memory with little to stop it. Director and series writer Paulo Morelli, and scriptwriter and fellow series scribe Elena Soaraz have presented a screenplay that provides the newcomer with all the background information required to jump into their world without difficulty. The result is more than entertaining enough for the duration, but says nothing new as a film in its own right. For the fans though, 'City Of Men' will be a fond farewell to beloved characters, and the nostalgia value will be enough to take it to the next level. It just doesn't work quite so well as a stand-alone picture.I would recommend therefore that interested parties avail themselves of the series if at all possible and hold off on 'City Of Men' until the end, which will doubtless prove more rewarding. While the film can be viewed separately, and is worth it alone for the cinematography, it will fail to resonate in the say way it does for its most ardent supporters.Actual rating 6 1/2 out of 10.

Three friendships, three betrayals, three tales to tell… Paulo Morelli delivers his take on the lives of the residents of Dead End Hill, where veiled truths are uncovered causing friends to become foes, lives to be lost and boys to become men. Amid a plot overflowing with passion and the prominence of personal growth, pardon and partnership; City Of Men conveys juxtapositions of the grim and the grand outcomes for treachery or disobedience of the unwritten rules of Rio de Janeiro.With the accent upon survival of the fittest, and the urge to "retrieve what is rightfully yours," salvage is a key motive for the characters and factor for the entire stratagem within City Of Men. In a rousing story screened with raw sensation using a fatherless, foolish and foreboding cast, we get to view a beautiful work of art, which is actually fast, fresh, fearless and forward thinking. VMF

This sepia-sunbleached feature derives from, and features the same main characters as, the eponymous 2002-2005 Brazilian TV series about (mostly) boys in the "favela" hill ghettos above Rio for which Morelli did some of the writing and directing. The series, starring Darlan Cunha as Laranjinha (Wallace) and Douglas Silva as Acerola (Ace) --growing up from year to year and episode to episode--sort of grew out of the Fernando Meirelles/Kátia Lund film, 'City of God,' which in turn was based on Paulo Lins' tumultuous and partly autobiographical novel about three decades in the slums and the involvement of youth as dealers, assassins, and victims. Actually the Ace/Wallace characters as young teenagers, always played by Silva and Cunha, predate 'City of God' by two years; they appeared in a short film called 'Palace II' in 2000. The history of these films and stories is as intricate as the world they depict. Douglas Silva was the prepubescent tough in 'City of God' known by he moniker Dadinho--Lil' Dice.'City of Men' is warmer and more intimate than the original film. 'City of God' has been both admired for its virtuosity--it's full of tours de force of visual violence and equally brilliant feats of rapid storytelling--and condemned as reveling too much in blood and gore, making teenage killers who terrorize neighborhoods into little glamor boys. That's quite true. It's unfortunately also true that in the ghettos of Rio as of other places such as the USA, young gun-toting drug dealers are the sexy local pop stars. Maybe the earlier film fails to take a sufficiently clear moral stand, or too much reflects the viewpoints of the young favela males it depicts. Nonetheless it's exhilarating film-making. Paradoxically, it also has a more positive arc than 'City of Men,' because its hero works his way out of the slums and into mainstream Rio de Janeiro to become a photojournalist. In 'City of Men,' nothing like that happens. Instead, there is a difficult reconciliation between the two boys, on the brink of eighteen, despite a stunning revelation about their lost fathers, and one of the fathers comes back into the picture and, reluctantly at first, chooses to be a warm presence in the life of his son. Both of the boys endure moments of terrible loneliness and isolation, which reveal how isolating the world of shifting and dangerous loyalties and hills fought for and lost is for a boy who in the first place lacks parents. But the focus is on the reconciliations.In the TV series, the boys are in school. They face difficulties even showing up, and only one of them, Ace (Silva) really hits the books (he's also fascinated by guns of all kinds). Laranjinha is closer to turning into a young hood.Thugh the new movie 'City of Men' is less specific than the TV series (judging by the DVD collections of episodes that I've seen) and suffers a bit by comparison with either it or 'City of God,' the vibrancy of the life on offer in all these films is still unmistakable, as well as the attractiveness of the young actors, the warmth of the world evoked--and vernacular swiftness that of the filming and editing, which somehow is both relaxing and unnerving.Wallace/Laranjinha is trying to find out who his real father is; he doesn't want "unknown" to be on the place for "father" on his papers. Acerola knows his father is dead, and he wants to know what happened. He's faced with the local problem from the other side. His wife Cris (Camila Monteiro) keeps leaving their toddler son Clayton (Vinicius Oliveira) with him to take care of. He doesn't want to accept the responsibility. But if he reneges on it, he'll leave Clayton in the same place he and Wallace are in. Ace abandons Clayton on the beach early on when Madrugadão (Midnight, Jonathan Haagensen), the gang leader of the hill where they live, risks assassination to descend on a super-hot day for a swim in the ocean. He also turns some flashy cartwheels and shows off his spectacular pecs. Madrugadão, like Wallace (i.e. Darlan Cunha), is handsome and charismatic. Ace is so childish he forgets his own son; but he rushes back and finds him. And when Cris gets a job in the wealthier city of São Paulo, Ace, with great difficulty, forces himself to take on the responsibility of raising Clayton.Wallace (perhaps a bit too easily) finds his father, a bearded man named Heraldo (Rodrigo dos Santos), who has just gotten out of prison after serving fifteen years of a twenty-year sentence--for murder. Heraldo's beard cannot conceal the fact that he is not very mature. He hasn't shouldered the responsibilities of being a man. But he also carries the weight of suffering and gratitude.When rival gang leader Fasto (Eduardo "BR" Piranha) takes over Midnight's territory on Dead End Hill, a new gang war breaks out right in the middle of Ace and Wallace's journey of self-discovery.'City of Men' is a more tender, individual and grownup story than 'City of God'; from what I've seen of the TV series it grows out of, it's less specific and less witty. It works as a kind of antidote to the amorality one feels in 'City of God,' and its warmth is touching. Nor is it visually ineffective, or its sense of the milieu less rich--except. Except that it quite lacks the momentum and adrenaline-rush brilliance of 'City of God's' virtuoso film-making and editing, or the rich range of minor characters the latter has. It is a little bit meandering, and its fast jump-cut slides from scene to scene sometimes seem out of place. As the AV Club reviewer says, much has been gained in this new film, but much has been lost as well. Still 'City of Men' is well worth watching.