Significant exploitation film, with a strong aesthetics from the 70's but also with strong roots in Brazilian sexploitation "pornochanchadas". It begins very well and is well performed, seeming that Dirty Harry worked in a clockwork-orange police department in red-light Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. With well done action scenes, quite decent acting, naked people having sex, and an interesting and diverse soundtrack, it could have worked. However, there are some serious social-political problems and, besides that, the side events in the story become increasingly loosely connected. The main character, based in a real life man, was a policeman who had many famous love affairs and worked in a criminal death squad during military dictatorship. The movie was also released years before authoritarian regime were over. Therefore, there is the possibility that the intention was showing that police was corrupt, tortured, killed without due law process (and those who were not murdered were alternatively jailed in awful conditions). If it is true, doing this disguised as an action flick indeed could be a smart strategy to bypass censorship. However, it is too much ambiguous if it was hidden criticism against dictatorship repressive apparatus or if they simply were not taking seriously what happened in authoritarian Brazil, were supporting violation of human rights as a desirable path for law and order, or simply saw misogynist and reactionary exploitation as profitable. The rape scene in the drugstore (not the only one!), although not too explicit, was disgusting. Saying in other words: if it was not a strategy to criticize dire problems under the menace of censorship, it was alternatively a proto-fascist piece that opposed the goal of building a fair society. It reminded me a more recent and successful film, "Elite Squad", in which police also tortured and killed in a seriously brutalized warlike behaviour. Those characters were not taken as criminals by most viewers, but as brave heroes who were constrained by unnecessary bureaucracy that favoured bandits. That may explain the fascist path Brazil would take few years afterwards. Indeed, the death squad from "I killed Lúcio Flavio" was curiously called by a minor character as an "elite squad" at some moment. Ambiguity in this kind of film is too dangerous... or perhaps it is simply deliberate support for fascism, and it is me who am trying to envision a better perspective. To resume, a loose script and ambiguous narrative choices made the film not to be good as it could have been.
