Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)

As forceful as its title suggests, and sometimes unbelievably ballsy.

There’s no denying the sharpness of his (Jason Kohn) insights into a society that hasn’t so much collapsed as reconstituted itself around venality, profiteering and rage.

With an excess of excitable style, samba music, and heady, montage-driven metaphor that threatens to bury his film's key ideas, young-gun director Kohn--a New Yorker with South American roots--has clearly set out to make a splash. So far, he's succeeded.

Although it is never explicitly stated, Manda Bala essentially argues that when the middle class disappears, the rich and the poor end up feeding on each other, like the frogs that go cannibalistic at the frog farm that gives the movie its central metaphor.

The subject is huge and worthy, and the film makes a noble effort to embrace some of its complexity.

Instead of seriously investigating corruption, money laundering and the buying of politicians, Manda Bala would rather spend its time showing slimy brown frogs slithering over one another as they are dumped from one container into another.

Manda Bala is exciting and stylish, and Kohn knows exactly what he wants the movie to say. But he makes most of his points in the first 10 minutes, with disgusting slow-motion frog footage and sound bites from social scientists pointing out how "corruption is what links all other crimes." The rest is just so much show.