This is an advance review of Judas and the Black Messiah, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and will debut in theaters and on HBO Max on February 12. Our reviewer watched the movie via a digital screener. Read more on IGN’s policy on movie reviews in light of COVID-19 here.
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A film whose very title evokes reverence and betrayal, Judas and the Black Messiah is a powerful political drama about Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and FBI informant William O’Neal, who provided the layout to Hampton’s apartment for the police raid in which he was murdered. It paints a stark political picture of the late 1960s, unapologetically deifying (though never dehumanizing) the revolutionary Hampton, while simultaneously following O’Neal down a rabbit hole of increasing paranoia lest he be found out.
The film’s performances are undoubtedly its strongest suit, reuniting Get Out co-stars Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and Lakeith Stanfield as O’Neal. If it stumbles, it only does so in service of balancing two character-centric stories at once, each as human and emotionally charged as its counterpart. They seldom intersect in any manner other than plot mechanics — Hampton and O’Neal frequently interact, though without much resembling an actual relationship — but what each story has to say about the other holds enough thematic heft to make the film shine, despite its occasional dramatic disconnects.
After being pulled up on charges of car theft and impersonating a federal agent, O’Neal is conscripted by FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) into infiltrating the Panthers in order to win his freedom. Plemons puts on a welcoming smile, but whatever Mitchell’s actual politics — he regales O’Neal with tales of hunting down violent Klansmen — he’s ultimately a symbol of oppression for O’Neal, dangling conditional freedom in front of him in exchange for information. Mitchell’s views seem more moderate compared to his bosses, including J. Edgar Hoover (a terrifying Martin Sheen), who wants to prevent the rise of a “Black Messiah.” But without the need to extemporize directly to the camera, the film frames even Mitchell’s place in the story as ultimately antagonistic. He claims to believe in civil rights, but not “cheating [one’s] way to equality”; he claims the Panthers are the same kind of violent terrorists as the KKK, but the film thoroughly dismantles this narrative, centering the Panthers’ breakfast programs and their contributions to medical infrastructure in communities that sorely lacked it.
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Once O’Neal becomes embedded within the Panthers, the film’s focus is frequently pulled towards Hampton, whose full voice Kaluuya replicates, walking a fine line between physical reality and performative dramatizations. Hampton was a young leader who spoke so quickly that he almost swallowed his words; Kaluuya captures that same fervent energy and refuses to do Hampton’s excitable nature a disservice by over-enunciating. Instead, he imbues Hampton’s every word, action, and stride with magnetism (Kaluuya has a unique talent for non-verbal acting, telling entire stories with mere shifts in posture). The film makes Hampton incredibly attractive, both physically and spiritually. He’s as gentle as he is assertive, tender behind the scenes but immediately commanding any room into which he walks.
Sometimes, director Shaka King mines drama from that very action: walking into a room. For instance, when Hampton (accompanied by O’Neal and several other Panthers) attempts to join hands with Black revolutionary group the Crowns — a fictitious amalgam of several contemporary parties — the scene is filled with razor-wire tension, as the Panthers enter the Crowns’ meeting space and find themselves surrounded by armed rivals on all sides. King places the Panthers in the center of the room, standing back-to-back as they both meet and fight off the Crowns’ adversarial gaze. The sequence carries the dueling tensions of Hampton trying to reason with the group at gunpoint (his presence feels enormous, despite standing a foot shorter than the leader of the Crowns), and of O’Neal potentially being recognized by someone who knew him in his pre-Panther life.
Of course, crafting an entirely fictional rival group can be politically murky, especially since King doesn’t delve into the Crowns and their political differences with the Panthers (he simply dresses them in green berets and black jackets, the inverse of what the Panthers wear to this meeting). However, the rest of the film’s politics have a more clear-eyed approached, from Hampton’s lessons on liberation from capitalism to his Rainbow Coalition with real groups like the white southern Young Patriots under William “Preacherman” Fesperman, or the Puerto Rican Young Lords under José Cha Cha Jiménez.
Phrases like “Marxist” don’t cross Hampton’s lips as they did in real life (although “socialism” does, and Hoover expresses fears of communism before mentioning Hampton), but Hampton’s speeches and instructions still lean explicitly anti-capitalist. One might easily note the inherent contradiction of a film about a Black communist revolutionary being funded by capitalist enterprise — it’s a valid critique — but the reality of politics vis-à-vis studio funding is the suits don’t often care what’s on-screen so long as it makes them money. It’s a depressing reminder of the degree to which “money speaks,” but on the other hand, it also leads to directors like King (and his co-writer Will Berson) being able to make Hampton’s politics a recognizable part of the film’s historical fabric, with minimal tiptoeing or watering down.
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Hampton’s half of the film follows him in and out of prison, and from speech to speech and activist enterprise to activist enterprise. It does little to drive the larger plot — the film is framed mostly by what intelligence O’Neal is able to gather and relay to Mitchell — but this focus on Hampton’s ideals foregrounds what might otherwise be a mere political backdrop (a la Hampton’s presence in The Trial of the Chicago 7). By contrasting Hampton’s political presence with O’Neal’s activities, and switching seamlessly between them, the film injects immediate tension into O’Neal’s dilemma about following through with the FBI and putting Hampton & co. in danger.
Between Hampton, his lover Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), and other Panther comrades like Jimmy Palmer (Ashton Sanders), Jake Winters (Algee Smith), and a particularly electric Judy Harmon (Ironheart’s Dominique Thorne), the film builds an engaging ensemble. Each character feels like a complete presence, and each performance makes an impact, filling every corner of the frame with life, passion, and camaraderie. The result is an almost infectious commitment to the Panthers’ cause. From a historical standpoint, the film acts as corrective, flying in the face of common narratives like Mitchell’s, which label them terrorists and such. From a dramatic standpoint, the allure of the Panthers — who come off equally cool and compassionate — makes O’Neal’s half of the story, and his impending betrayal, all the more difficult to stomach. What’s at stake isn’t just the Panthers’ safety, but the progress they’ve built; O’Neal doesn’t so much betray Hampton as he betrays the cause itself.
Stanfield is downright revelatory as O’Neal, a man fighting to stay centered as he becomes absorbed in the movement, all the while armed with the knowledge that he’s a fraud, and his presence puts the Panthers in danger. In the rare moments where O’Neal’s story is questioned by his comrades, Stanfield’s equilibrium shifts wildly between calm reserve and punishing anxiety; watching him lie results in some of the most painfully honest Hollywood cinema in recent memory.
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However, despite frequently returning to O’Neal, the film does falter when it comes to dramatizing how much he actually does or doesn’t believe in the cause, or how this belief changes or strengthens the deeper his deception gets. In real life, O’Neal was a man who either believed (or used as a justification) his own contributions to Civil Rights, a contradiction the film even includes through real interview footage and references by other characters. But this contradiction doesn’t seem to factor into the way O’Neal is dramatized — which is a shame, because as great as Stanfield is at wrestling with dishonesty, seeing him wrestle with an emerging and difficult truth might have tipped the film over from pretty great into truly masterful territory.
Still, it’s a visually stunning piece, especially thanks to cinematographer Sean Bobbit (12 Years A Slave) and production designer Sam Lisenco (Uncut Gems), who make every space and surface feel both colorful, yet worn and lived-in as if the Panthers were fighting to keep alive a vivaciousness that was constantly subdued. Every scene comes pre-loaded with personal doubts, which the actors are forced to dig through; Hampton’s doubts, though he doesn’t vocalize them, are expressed in private moments in which he reenacts speeches by the late Malcolm X, as the 21-year-old leader stares down the size of the shoes he needs to fill. Its approach to the continuum of Civil Rights makes it a neat companion piece to Regina King’s One Night In Miami (in which Malcolm X expresses similar doubts about his place in history), but Judas and the Black Messiah is its own beast, blazing a dramatic path that tears through the usual platitudes of Hollywood biopics, and replaces them with full-throated calls to social revolution.
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