'MANDA BALA' TAKES SHOTS AT CRIME IN SAO PAOLO, BRAZIL.

Byline: BOB STRAUSS

>FILM CRITIC

Sao Paulo, Brazil, with a population of 20 million and more financial capital flowing through it than the rest of South America combined, is unsurprisingly a hotbed of kidnapping.

The documentary "Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)" is fascinating when it details the horrific particulars of this criminal enterprise. The kidnappings are usually performed by impoverished residents of the city's sprawling favela slums who favor such gratuitous methods as videotaping the tormented captives and mailing their cut-off ears to relatives.

For their part, the city's wealthy targets move around in helicopters and, when they have to come down from their high-rise sanctuaries, bullet-proofed cars that aren't bullet-proof enough.

The Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary's interviews with abductors and victims, overwhelmed detectives and paranoid businessmen, are as absorbing as they are chilling. But rich as it is, first-time director Jason Kohn, a New Yorker with Latin American roots, isn't content with just that material. He's out to link this bloody enterprise of the poor and disenfranchised to the highest levels of government corruption.

Almost half of the film is focused on an Amazon money-laundering scam perpetrated by the former president of the Brazilian senate, a politician named Jader Barbalho from the northern state of Para.

As if that weren't diverting enough, Kohn also concentrates, with much symbolic relish, on one of Barbalho's many front operations, a vast frog farm that the director clearly means to represent something about the dehumanization of Brazilian society. This is more weird than anything else, and while the double-subject narrative creates a certain comprehensiveness, you can't help feeling that you'd learn a lot more about both topics from films that examined each exclusively.

Artful editing, an electric samba soundtrack and harrowingly grainy ransom videos give "Manda Bala" a formal kick that's rare in a documentary. And the squirm factor actually reaches its peak with Dr. Juarez Avelar, a brilliant and jolly plastic surgeon who specializes in ear reconstruction using rib cartilage. We're shown pretty much an entire operation ... and that says more about how Brazil is cannibalizing itself than all the reductive tadpole imagery in the world.

Bob Strauss [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

MANDA BALA (SEND A BULLET) - Three stars

>Not rated: violence, drug use, nudity, language.

>Director: Jason Kohn.

>Running time: 1 hr. 25 min.

>Playing: Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmle Royal, West L.A.

>In a nutshell: This jazzy documentary is rich with nuggets of information, but less successful elsewhere. In English and Portuguese with English subtitles and translation.