City of God: The Fight Rages On review – small screen follow-up loses power

When City Of God: The Fight Rages On opens, Buscapé, the weary photographer who goes by Rocket and is once again played by Alexandre Rodrigues with a comic sense of browbeat, is stuck in the same spot. He’s caught in the crossfire between rival gangs and police, just as we left him over two decades before; still holding the camera and narrating about the ways the cosmos keep putting him in tough spots. This time he drones on about how nothing has changed in his titular Rio de Janeiro favela as bullets whiz by, bodies pile up and he continues taking photos of the dead.

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None of this should come as a surprise. The entire point of City of God , the Oscar-nominated 2002 crime drama directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, was that the fact-based violence it sensationalized was cyclical and inescapable. That’s a lesson that a long-running show like Narcos took to heart – and milked – satisfying an appetite for Goodfellas-in-the-favela content that City of God stoked.

If there’s a point to a redux like The Fight Rages On – and that’s a big IF – it’s perhaps to serve as a soul-searching corrective to a movie that was wildly entertaining and bristling with authenticity but also leaning voyeuristic. What made City of God strike like white-hot lightning was how it married the pulp of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie to a neorealist social drama about impoverished children in Rio de Janeiro’s slums laying waste to each other. But it also left a bad taste in some critics’ mouths since so many characters came across as thin and disposable, like the dead bodies splashed across the newspaper Rocket works for.

The new six-part series – produced by Meirelles and directed by Aly Muritiba – brings back much of the original cast (the ones playing characters who survived) while covering the same terrain with considerably less flair. In the first couple of episodes provided to critics, Rocket is older and much less excitable (he’s naturally outgrown the pubescent vibes of the original). He’s grappling with his role as a photographer – not to mention a guide for the audience and stand-in for the film-makers – especially after he’s confronted with the way his photos are devoured by those untouched by violence.

His combative 15-year-old daughter tells him he exploits trauma. Her words sting; more so when they turn out to be accurate. A front-page photo Rocket snaps, of an innocent school kid gunned down, is weaponized by a crooked politician who wants to give the militarized police force more autonomy to storm the favelas.

In a post-BLM City of God, these cops won’t just be facing off against the criminals (many running game from within their own ranks) but also the activists, whom Rocket, and the series as a whole, makes a conscious effort to turn the lens to. Among them are Edson Oliveira’s Barbantinho, Rocket’s childhood best friend who has now grown into a community organizer with dreams of entering local office. Sabrina Rosa’s Cinthia, the girlfriend to the original’s civilian-turned-fallen-gang-leader Knockout Ned, is here channelling her trauma into positivity. She oversees the local community centre running programs to empower kids. Roberta Rodrigues’s Berenice, who watched her lover Shaggy gunned down by police in the original, plays a stern matriarchal figure in the community, likely to lay a heavy hand on any neighbourhood runt affiliating with local hoods.

The first episode hurriedly introduces these figures as well as a barrage of local crime bosses, politicians and journalists in a way that’s exhausting and at times incoherent.

City of God’s brilliance, the reason it was rightly celebrated for its screenplay and editing, was in the way it whittled two decades into a breakneck and loopy two hours that was playful with timelines. The movie would double-back and leap forward through the years to a samba-inflected rhythm. At every turn it would breathlessly introduce new characters, kill off familiar ones and bring back some we counted out. All the while, it never loses its grip on the audience.

There was a structural elegance to the movie that’s completely lost in the series, which somehow – with even more runway than its predecessor – complicates a relatively simple set-up. A war breaks out between paternalistic crime boss (Marcos Palmeira) and his temperamental lieutenant (Thiago Martins), who is goaded on by a passionate and trigger-happy girlfriend (Andréia Horta).

Familiar stuff, especially in a post-Narcos TV landscape, but this time it’s told in tropes, leaving the gritty authenticity of the source material lost in translation. As for whatever critical conversation the new series wants to have about exploiting and sensationalizing trauma, it rings hollow once the gunmen tool up and the MTV aesthetics kick in.

• City of God: The Fight Rages On airs on HBO Latino in the US beginning 25 August and will stream on Max with a UK date to be announced