Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Shaka King

Starring:  Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen, Dominique Fishback, Lil Rel Howery

Judas and the Black Messiah features strong performances in a movie which doesn't keep up with them.  I can't pinpoint why it lacks juice.   Daniel Kaluuya gives an impressively balanced performance of a Black Panther who doesn't simply give provocative speeches, but understands strengthening the Black community is the only way to achieve equality.   Kaluuya's J. Fred Hampton can "sell salt to slugs" says car thief/FBI agent impersonator turned informant William O'Neal (Stanfield) to his FBI handler Roy Mitchell (Plemons).  O'Neal isn't wrong and Mitchell is unimpressed.  Mitchell is under orders from J. Edgar Hoover (Sheen) to have Hampton and other Black Panthers arrested because he sees them as the next radical threat.  

The pieces are in place for a fiery movie which somehow invokes mild outrage at best.   O'Neal must betray one of his own in order to stay out of prison, causing expected inner conflicts within O'Neal which haunts him the rest of his days.   In the epilogue, we learn O'Neal committed suicide after the premiere on PBS' Eyes on the Prize 2 in 1990, in which O'Neal was interviewed.   Hampton did not have the chance to live until 1990.   He was shot and killed in 1969 following a police raid which was really an assassination.  O'Neal assisted in that murder by feeding information to the FBI about Hampton's every move. 

What went wrong?  Why isn't there three and a half or four stars attached to the top of this review instead of a respectful but underwhelming two and a half stars?   This type of story has been told before as recently as Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019), in which a confidant and friend of Jimmy Hoffa is forced to be his executioner.   The relationship between Hampton and O'Neal is solid, but not deep.  They aren't together enough to form a strong bond.  The movie might've done better to flesh out the tug of war between O'Neal and Mitchell, who in one scene invites O'Neal into his home and offers him the good Scotch.   Could there be an added dimension to their relationship?  This, however, doesn't develop either.   O'Neal meets with Mitchell and expresses his dismay over being a rat (or worse), and Mitchell has to smoothly keep him at bay or outright threaten him with prison for car theft and impersonating an FBI agent while doing so.   This begins to be repetitive..  Perhaps prison might've worked out better for O'Neal in hindsight

Hampton is fleshed out more as he forges alliances in Chicago with other groups representing the downtrodden, including one with White supremacist leanings.   To Hampton, poor is poor, and that's what they all should be fighting against.   Hampton also is about to become a father and is allowed to be seen as hard-nosed, yet gentler when dealing with his girlfriend (Fishback).   Kaluuya will likely be Oscar-nominated in the Supporting Actor category, but let's face it:  He's a lead and the more compelling person which Judas and the Black Messiah only spends part of the time exploring.