Plot

In 1997 Rio de Janeiro, Captain Nascimento has to find a substitute for his position while trying to take down drug dealers and criminals before the Pope visits.

In 1997, before the visit of the pope to Rio de Janeiro, Captain Nascimento from BOPE (Special Police Operation Battalion) is assigned to eliminate the risks of the drug dealers in a dangerous slum nearby where the pope intends to be lodged. Captain Nascimento is trying to find a man to replace him because his wife is pregnant and he intends to quit the command and become a trainer of the new recruits. Meanwhile, the two idealistic friends Neto and Matias join the Military Police force expecting to become honest policemen and fight the criminals. However, they see only corruption, lack of competence and stupid bureaucracy in the Military Police, and after a serious incident in the Morro da Babilônia, they decide to join the BOPE. The lives of Capitain Nascimento, Neto and Matias are entwined along the next months, first in the tough training period and then in action against drug dealers. Nascimento believes that Neto could be his substitute, but his impulsive attitudes jeopardizes his choice. Later, the intelligent Matias seems to be the correct choice, but he needs to prove that he has heart.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

During a brutal campaign to secure the Pope's 1997 visit to Rio de Janeiro, Captain Nascimento struggles to find a suitable replacement who will continue the BOPE's merciless efforts to infiltrate the favelas and wage war against their dominant drug underworld.—LightObscure

Two childhood friends decide to enlist in Rio de Janeiro's Military Police Department. After juggling their police jobs and college, both make up their minds to try out for a Special Operations Squad whose mission is to take down the drug-lords that plague the city. Both men struggle to survive, facing the daily challenges of dealing with pressure at home and fighting an unnamed war on the streets.—Anonymous

The movie starts with a narrator, Captain Roberto Nascimento (Wagner Moura), and he briefly explains how the police and the drug lords of Rio cooperate with each other (policemen collect a weekly bribe to deliberately ignore the drug trafficking and related crimes in the slums). In medias res, Major Oliveira (Marcelo Valle), a police officer of Rio De Janeiro and his colleagues are shown driving through Morro Da Babilonia towards a Baile Funk to collect the bribe.

Meanwhile, novice police officers André Matias (André Ramiro) and Neto Gouveia (Caio Junqueira) are shown riding a motorcycle at the same Favela, and with Neto armed with a sniper. Neto uses a sniper rifle to check on the police team as they stop near the party and talk to some traffic officers. Neto shoots one of them and provokes a deadly gunfight between police and thugs, both sides unaware of where the bullet came from. Nascimento leads his colleagues from BOPE, Rio Special Police Department, heading to the shootout to interfere and save the officers.

Six months earlier, showing Nascimento and his wife Rosane (Maria Ribeiro) during her pregnancy of his first child. Realizing it will not be possible to be such an absent father when his child is born, Nascimento decides to search for a successor for his role as a captain. This coincides with an operation he will have to lead in Morro dos Prazeres in order to secure the location so that Pope John Paul II can spend the night at an Archbishop's home, located near the slum buildings and Favelas. The operation will require daily trips into the Favela filled with heavily armed drug lords, and Nascimento is initially against it, but is forced by his superiors to accept it, due to Pope's regards and requirements.

Meanwhile, Neto's and Matias' debut as police officers take place. Both are honest officers and are soon disillusioned by their corrupt superiors. While Neto is in charge of fixing run-down police cars and bikes but with no education about cars, Matias is responsible of registering every complaint in his small archive office. Both share a small apartment in Rio and are long-time friends and flat mates.

Besides working at the local police, Matias is a Law student, where his classmates are shown as "young and spoiled" kids. He soon befriends Roberta, Edu and Maria (whom he later dates). All three work at a NGO that takes care of poor children from a local Favela. Roberta dates Rodrigues, who helps Maria administrate the organization. Edu also works for Baiano (Fábio Lago), the local dealer, by selling marijuana at his university.

Neto is soon bored of working at the mechanic but fails to be transferred to another department. By riding with his superior Captain Fabio (Milhem Cortaz), he learns about corruption schemes adopted by police officers - small establishments pay periodic bribes to the police for safety. Another scheme is the relocation of dead bodies to other battalion's areas, so that one's criminal statistics will artificially decrease. Fabio tells Neto that Oliveira is cornering the bribe market in connivance with superiors. He is even taking away schemes that belonged to Fabio's area previously.

Willing to raise some money to fix many police cars at once, Neto plans to steal the bribe Oliveira collects from the drug lords and asks Matias and Fabio to help them. Fabio declines, since he will not have a share. The duo succeeds in stealing the money, but Oliveira wants a payback. He thinks Matias and Neto were only following orders from Fabio. By dragging Fabio to Baile Funk shown at the beginning of the movie, he plans to have him killed, but Neto and Matias follow the police car and shoot a drug soldier from a vantage point, starting a deadly gunfight. Fabio escapes from his colleagues and shoots them from behind a bar.

At the time of the gunfight, Nascimento and his BOPE colleagues were at another Favela torturing a suspected criminal to get information of the whereabouts of the body of another young suspected criminal Nascimento captured but released during a previous incursion to that slum. The kid ended up being killed by his superiors, for they do not forgive informants, and his mother visited Nascimento at the police station to claim the missing body. Nascimento thinks of his upcoming child and decides to go after the body but is called to solve the situation at Babilonia.

After cruising into the Favela, killing the criminals and rescuing the trapped officers, Nascimento meets Matias and Neto, who are informed of the preparation course they can apply for to ingress at BOPE. Both decide to give it a try to escape from the corrupted officers. Fabio goes with them, seeing an opportunity to be distant from Oliveira. Meanwhile, Nascimento's son, called Rafael, is born, forcing him to find a replacement for his role as a captain.

Just when the course is about to start, Maria manages to bookmark a lawyer's job interview for Matias with the district senator. Just after she puts the phone away, her friends from the NGO and Baiano get into the office with a newspaper featuring a picture of Matias and Neto carrying a dead drug lord's body. Enraged by the fact that Maria was bringing a police officer into the slum (even though she was not aware of her lover's part-time job) and that the dead drug lord was his friend, Baiano threatens her and her friends.

The course of BOPE proves to be quite a tough challenge for all officers that enrolled. In the first part of the program, students are trained under extreme pressure and physical punishments, "to eliminate the weak and, mainly, the corrupt", as Nascimento explains, until their spirit is broken, or they manage to hold up. It starts with the BOPE members cursing and swearing the officers and forcing them to quit. It also starts with the next strategy class, and the survival skills. In this region, Fabio gets feet fungus and quits with another candidates, forcing him to build his own grave and his name on it (as a quitting humiliation process).

The second part of the training program begins, and the eight remaining candidates are taught how to shoot, move and invade a Favela efficiently and safely. Soon, they are brought into the operation Nascimento was leading to guarantee the safety of the Pope. Matias, still rejected by his friends, confronts Edu and orders him to arrange him a meeting with Romerito, a boy he met at the NGO. The kid has eyesight problems and needs glasses, which Matias had bought. Since it is a suicide mission to get into the slum now that's everyone's aware of his job, Matias blackmails Edu to arrange the meeting at the base of the slum, or he will arrest him for selling drugs. However, Neto informs Matias that his job interview is placed for tomorrow and that he confirmed it. Neto offers himself to go in his place while Matias goes to the interview.

Later, Edu reveals the plan to Baiano, and the drug lord decides to take the officer down so that he will not disturb his sells at the university. Once Neto reaches the base of the slum, he is trapped by several thugs inside a bar, where Baiano shoots him in the back. Before finishing him, Baiano checks on his near-dead body, and finds a tattoo on his arm, with two knives and a skull in the middle (BOPE's flag logo) and realizes that he is from BOPE. Knowing that killing an officer from such department is like "signing his own death sentence", as Nascimento says, he decides to hide. He also takes Roberta and Rodrigues to the local hill, where he shoots Roberta in the head and necklaces Rodrigues as the punishment for having brought a police officer to his slum. Neto dies soon afterwards at the hospital, and Maria arrives, apologizing Mathias, but he rejects her for working with criminals and drug dealers.

Seeking revenge, Matias, Nascimento and their fellow BOPE officers start making daily incursions into Baiano's slum to torture people linked to the drug dealer and force them to reveal wherever he is hiding. After finding out that it was Edu who told Baiano about Matias' meeting with Romerito, the officer interrupts a peace walk and beats Edu up for indirectly killing his best friend, and Maria tries to stop him and assaults him, but he yells at her that she is a prostitute and a heavy smoker, and to the others as well.

Finally, the officers get to a boy who, after being tortured, reveals the exact location of Baiano. A sniper kills his bodyguard, forcing Baiano to escape. Seeing him running on the roof, Nascimento shoots him, though not fatally. Nascimento steps on Baiano and tells him that he is about to die, but Baiano asks the captain not to shoot him in the face, in order "not to ruin the wake". Nascimento then walks away and grabs a shotgun. He gives it to Matias, saying "do it, he is yours", narrating that he already killed Baiano, but wanted Matias to kill him as a revenge, and to know he is going to be his successor. Matias points the gun to Baiano's face, and the screen whites out, with a gunshot heard.