Huge success at the time of its release and a cult nowadays, "Rio Babilônia" ("Rio Babylon") is an urban tale about money, power, sex, corruption, high class parties and other adventures in the beautiful Rio de Janeiro. Our tour guide through this wild world is Marciano (Joel Barcellos), a well-known guide who mostly enjoy life and its pleasures than really touring his clients through the city. Among his clients are a famous industrial/gold contrabandist (Jardel Filho) returning to the country after a 20 year absence, and now he's back to make some big business; an American star (Pat Cleveland) and others.
During a party Marciano accidentally gets an envelope containing photos of a known investigative journalist (Christiane Torloni) who is working on a case to put the contrabandist behind bars. With that, he assumed she's in danger and will try to help her with her mission. The movie was going quite well considering the material and the way it was developed but it chokes after this part when all of sudden it's just sex, wild parties, lots of cursing and an unflattering view of Brazilians and Americans; everything is thrown in our faces without reason, without a purpose or anything. It tries to be realistic with its view of the crime, robbery, drugs, sex and all but it gets stuck with some horrible acting that gets distractive all the time (except in the famous pool scene).
This regular softcore/semi-porn film is well made in some technical aspects, the soundtrack is very cool (the main theme 'Babilônia Rock' stays in your head), the view of Rio is great even the scenes on the slums are great, but there's countless problems with this film. The acting is an atrocity, I don't know if I feel embarrassed of the actors for playing so lousy their roles or for me for watching this thing. I know I feel sorry for Jardel Filho in his last film role (he died in the following year on the set of a TV series), he's a great actor but was completely wasted here, despite being the best performance in the film as the villain. Torloni was a beauty spectacle and her appearance was nice in it while the main actor even with no sexy appeal or good looks has the chance to be the protagonist of some of the most bold sex scenes of the time (back then, the Military Dictatorship wasn't so controlling with the censorship like it was in the 1970's, some scenes made into the final cut and others were cut out of the film). The delivery of lines by the cast was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard in our cinema, so unnatural.
If you have a weakness for trashy films of the 1980's this is almost a must see. Most nostalgic Brazilians will be amazed with the Concord scene right in the first minutes. Remember that supersonic jet which entered in retirement in 2003? Well, here it's appearances stopped coming in 1983 after six, seven years of the first flight in Rio, back in 1976, so here you'll see some moments of this jet in our soil. Other than that "Rio Babilônia" offers less than we wanted, a real and rough look at the 20th Century Babylon with some deeper thoughts or a real critic of the society at the time. All we get is porn and not much of a good one! At least, the ending was very realistic with the bad ones winning everything, the good ones forgotten and some of the coolest and richest people in town getting robbed by the most dangerous types of the slums. Or you think progress can't cross a bridge? 5/10
