Inducing laughter and bringing in fragments of the vicious subgenre, crime comedies have always performed well in Hollywood, whether in the movies or on the small screens. Popularized for features like Deadly Machine, Heavy Cop, Rush Hour, Bad Boys, and As Branquelas, the buddy-cop format never goes out of style and is often the perfect choice for tumultuous times. And Cabras da Peste is coming to Netflix at exactly one clinical moment. While the national cinema suffers in the face of an uncertain scenario, the production brings this great past of references, sprinkled with an entirely Tupiniquim identity, which reinforces the value of the art produced here.
Directed by Vitor Brandt, the feature film follows an intrepid policeman named Bruceuilis (Edmilson Filho), who decides to travel to São Paulo, in order to meet the goat Celestina – a legacy of his small town in the interior of Ceará. Your journey will take completely different and unusual paths, when you meet Trindade (Matheus Nachtergaele), a clumsy and “cowardly” policeman, who does anything to escape a confrontation. Together, they will attempt to dismantle a group of mobsters, as they embroil themselves in sinister riots, bordering on absurdity and even slapstick comedy – to the tune of Os Trapalhões.
Imperfect at times, but delicious most of the time, Cabras da Peste is the type of comedy that values our Brazilian, while also extracting a few references and tributes from Hollywood cinema. Bringing back memories of some of the genre’s most beloved productions – like even the Brooklyn Nine-Nine series, the feature starring Nachtergaele and Edmilson Filho is solid in its humor, though it doesn’t perform every time. Playing with the mannerisms of the inhabitants of the Northeast, the film makes a light and unpretentious cultural contrast and knows how to make us laugh heartily in its main moments.
Here Matheus Nachtergaele and Edmilson Filho form this unlikely classic duo which is complete in their differences and the charisma of both actors is remarkable, standing out even in scenes governed by beaten clichés common to the genre. With protagonists well integrated on the screen, the production passes quickly before our eyes and even convinces us of its absurdities and of those moments when certain action scenes sin in their technical quality.
Enjoying his screen time without tiring the audience, Brandt knows how to take advantage of Edmilson Filho’s love for martial arts and allows him to perform on stage, wasting those exaggerated and hilarious moves we love so much in Cine comedy. Holliúdy. With goat Celestina standing out and even starring in some of the film’s best moments, Cabras da Peste is a comedy that doesn’t want to be taken seriously. Between mistakes and success, he knows how to make people laugh and reminds us how necessary it is to protect our national cinema.