Review: Judas & The Black Messiah

Being white and British, I know very little about the American Civil Rights movement, I’ve heard about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Rosa Parks but little to nothing about the movement as a whole. In fact until Trial Of The Chicago 7 earlier in the year, I’d never even heard of Fred Hampton, and yet going by this film I really should’ve, this is a tragic, powerful tale of two young man trapped in the most turbulent time for Black Americans, one trying to change the world for the better, the other who did change the world but for worse.

It’s also one of the best films of the year so go watch it.

It’s the late 1960s, Dr King and Malcolm X have both been assassinated and racial violence in America has only gotten worse. Fearing an uprising in the disenfranchised, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover tasks his men with stopping the rise of Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party and co-founder of the Rainbow Coalition, a group of all races hurt by police brutality coming together for the betterment of Chicago. Hoover orders his men to find anything they can to stop Hampton or risk him becoming the next Black Messiah.

As luck would have it, they’re Judas comes in the form of William ‘Bill’ O’Neal, a young criminal who is arrested after stealing cars while posing as an FBI Agent, faced with five years in prison for impersonating an officer, he is approached by Agent Roy Mitchell and told that if he works for the FBI to go undercover into Hampton’s Black Panther Party and reports any findings to Mitchell. O’Neal agrees to the terms and makes his way into Hampton’s organisation, eventually becoming a driver for the group, but as he spends time with Hampton and sees the great work that he does for the community and bringing people together the fear while the cops take any and all opportunity to murder and terrorise Black neighbourhoods, the more O’Neal starts to feel himself torn between his own self-preservation and the fear that he’s about to be complacent in the destruction of one of America’s only good souls

The movie is equal parts thriller with O’Neal’s infiltration of Hampton’s party and trying to keep himself from being discovered and biopic with Hampton’s efforts to unify the Chicago gangs against the corrupt police force. The combination of the two works well to show both sides of the story, Hampton is a figure who achieved a lot in a short amount of time and in a world Post-Martin and Post-Malcolm, he clearly stood the chance of becoming the next figurehead in the Black Power movement and might have even had the power to change to world if he wanted to. While in contrast, O’Neal provides a lot of the tension with his undercover work, portrayed cleverly as both villain and victim, you don’t want him to get discovered because of the consequences but you’re begging for him to find a way out in order to prevent the real villains from using him to their own goals. It’s a great piece that brought to light a lot of hard truths and broken lies that I had no idea about, from the restructuring of the Black Panther Party to showcase their community outreach programmes rather than the militant group they’ve so often been shown as in media for decades to the disgusting behaviours of the Chicago Police Department and how they were often the aggressors in any situation in order to justify their actions against Black people.

Good things times have changed, right?

The one part of the story that’s a strange but understandable choice is in the ages of both Hampton and O’Neal, in real life Hampton was 21 during the events of the film while O’Neal was only 17, and yet both actors playing them are around early 30s in age. It’s understandable because given the outstanding performances it’s clear the film was going more for the ‘Feel’ of the characters, Hampton works wonders for this choice with the power behind him but for O’Neal, as great as Lakeith Stanfield is in the role, knowing that he was in fact a teenager during these events makes the FBI’s decision to use him all the more egregious and his decisions all the more tragic for what he did.

Speaking of the actors, there are some phenomenal performances across the board here, from Algee Smith as the friendly Jake Winters who’s broken down by the hatred around him to Dominique Fishback as Hampton’s girlfriend Deborah Johnson who was torn between standing by her man for the cause they both believed in and knowing that he was more than willing to be a martyr if his life went in that direction. There was a lot of power in the small parts that added into the larger story of what Hampton was doing in Chicago and why he was doing it.

Interestingly, the film portrays every cop character as a white racist prick, there are no good cops in this story because the film understands that the good cop narrative cannot exist if bad cops are allowed to stay on the force – the old adage of 1 bad cop plus 99 good cops who don’t speak up equals 100 bad cops. Some of it is borderline silly with Martin Sheen’s portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover being one speech away from a cartoon villain but I feel that was intentional, not just because history has shown that Hoover was basically a cartoon villain in his racist dealings against Black Americans but because in reality it was THAT bad, maybe even worse with cops terrorising anyone who looked at them funny and then claiming self-defence when shit hit the fan.

Good things times have changes, right?

The most interesting cop character was Jesse Plemons as Roy Mitchell, the FBI Agent who hired O’neal to be his infiltrator. What’s interesting about Roy is that there are a few scenes where he’s shown to be confused or upset at how the FBI are handling their efforts against the Civil Rights movement and he questions if the ends justify the means. And yet at the same time he’s clearly ok with how things work because he keeps putting the screw on O’Neal whenever push came to shove in order to protect the professional mandate that was expected of him. Plemons has made a great name for himself as the sly villain and there are shades of Breaking Bad’s Todd here that works well to really make you dislike Mitchell, but the moments of humanity, of almost decency remind you that there is a human face underneath the racist idealogy and that’s the truly scary part right there.

And then we get to the heart of the film, our messiah and his Judas. Both Stanfield and Kaluuya have been on the rise for years and both give some career best performances which are absolutely worth the praise – I mean Kaluuya just won the Oscar so, yeah. But it’s not hard to see why, Daniel Kaluuya just fully embodies the spirit of Fred Hampton and brings to life a man who honestly wants to make the world a better place not just for his black brothers and sisters, but for all who have been oppressed for the police force. There’s so much charm in every calm word that Kaluuya speaks that you can understand why Hampton was as successful as he was, how he was able to go into the lion’s den of White Southerners and preach about their shared troubles AND win them over. More than that though it was his power, Kaluuya played Hampton as a peaceful man but when he wanted to get the crowd going he got them fucking going, the sheer force in his ‘I am a revolutionary’ speech is palpable through the screen. Hampton was obviously a great man and that does factor into how great he was as a character, but it’s Kaluuya’s ability to bring forth that greatness that makes him work so well, he doesn’t just play the part, he channels something within in to let us see the Fred Hampton that we all deserved.

On the other side of the coin was Lakeith Stanfield as William O’Neal. Now as previously mentioned O’Neal was only 17 which knowing now does change my feelings slightly but not enough to take away from Stanfield’s performance, in fact a lot of the usually teenage attributes can be attributed to a man so far removed from society that he doesn’t know anything else. For one thing his fear of going to prison is understandable at any age – especially when we see how bad prison was during this time – for another there’s little bits here and there that show that O’Neal struggles to fit in most places, with Hampton and the Panther’s he’s too gung-ho, too focussed on violent retribution to fit into their peaceful community work, but with Mitchell in the upper-class restaurants where they meet he’s too crass, too quick to eat his food rather than savour it, at one point dressing up in a beige suit because he thinks that’s fancy. O’Neal doesn’t fit in anywhere and that’s important to remember because what Stanfield does so well is show us how he’s won over by Hampton, how much he comes to understand and respect the man but is too far into his own self-interests to stop the FBI from closing in on Fred, he might not have fit the Panther mould but for the first time O’Neal had somewhere he felt he could belong and it was under the worse circumstances, by the film’s final half hour the look of sheer pain and sadness on Stanfield’s face is heartbreaking.

The film takes an interesting stance by not condemning O’Neal’s actions but not excusing them either – which considering where his life went afterwards is probably for the best – O’Neal is definitely another victim of the racism that plague American law enforcement but it was a more sinister racism, one that shook his hand and said he wasn’t like the others. On the other hand his actions, while motivated by self-preservation, do lead to others getting hurt or worse throughout the film and it’s left ambiguous as to how much the real O’Neal felt guilty towards those actions, more than that he never takes the chance to tell Fred the truth and hope that he’d understand. O’Neal’s betrayal doesn’t come from greed or hatred, but rather from ambivalence, his inability to commit to a cause greater than himself and it’s all the more tragic for his character because of that, the way Stanfield plays O’Neal makes it difficult for me to hate his actions, but it’s so goddamn easy to pity him.

Director Shaka King does a fantastic job at showcasing the power behind the moments shown on screen, there’s always a sense of foreboding that carries throughout the film, sometimes you can recognise it as the tension of the scene such as when Hampton goes to talk to the leader of rival gang The Crowns and finds him and his people unarmed against an army of guns, but the rest of the film has this undercurrent of unease which perfectly captures the feeling of the time. There are scenes in the film where the Panthers are forced to fight back against the police and it’s clearly a losing fight every time, a shootout about half-way through the film is absolutely terrifying and even once the bullets stop you’re waiting for some overzealous cop to execute someone because that’s the level of brutality we’ve seen and it’s the level of brutality that Hampton and his people faced. Bringing it all to screen is not an easy task but King doesn’t hold back, he includes the violence because it’s necessary for the story to show just how fucked up this time was, at times he shows the full scale of Civil Warfare like the shootout scene, but in others he’ll hide in the background because our imaginations can fill in the rest which is the case for near the end with the focus on a character’s face and the strength they need in order to keep from breaking apart.

As foreboding as the film is at times King never forgets to add in some levity every now and again, little moments to remind you who’s fighting and what they’re fighting for, mostly these revolve around the love story between Fred and Deborah but their point still stands, the love and care these two have for each other and watching it bloom gives a little respite from the horror and makes the next terrible scene all the worse knowing what’s at stake. The best scene for this comes near the end – and for your history buffs out there it’s when O’Neal meets Mark Clarke – where Hampton is calming nerves, talking about what he and Deborah are going to do with their unborn son and you feel at ease, but then you see O’Neal alone at the side with tears in his eyes and you know that whatever comes next is not going to be good. It’s the dichotomy of life for Black Americans that even their happiest moments comes with fear of someone knocking at your door.

King’s handling of the themes that plagued Black Americans then and still plague them now is also to be applauded, it’s easy to say that ‘things haven’t changed’ because they haven’t but that’s not what King puts his focus into, he shows us that Hoover and the FBI and the police-force are all a bunch of racist fucking bastards because we know that but through O’Neal and Hampton he shows us a core message that has been lost over the years, that self-interests can destroy an ideology built on unity and that unity is needed now more than ever. The core tenants of Hampton’s teachings were to bring people of all colours and creeds together to form a unified front and since he had the FBI after him it was clearly working, that togetherness, that shared pain into progress is necessary for change if people can stop fighting over who has it worse and realise there’s a common enemy. There’s also minor themes that touch upon the dangers of figureheads, the deaths of Dr King and Malcolm X have thrown a wrench into the Civil Rights movement and once Fred is arrested over trumped-up charges his organisation struggles without him, having a voice to look up to isn’t a bad thing, but it’s moving on when that voice falls that needs to be overcome, something that the Black Lives Matter movement today has succeeded as several groups working together, if they can take Hampton’s message of peace to heart then change can happen.

There’s a lot to the heart of Judas & The Black Messiah, it’s a thriller about a man trapped between his own preservation and the fight for equality, it’s a biopic bringing the life of Fred Hampton to millions who knew little or even nothing about him, it’s a cautionary tale about the insidiousness of institutionalised racism and how it can destroy a movement just because it disagrees with giving minorities a human right. Mostly though it’s a powerful reminder of a time gone and a time we’re still living, the combined efforts of Stanfield and Kaluuya to bring these two men to life and together give some truly outstanding performances, together with Shaka King’s evocative direction reminds us why men like Fred Hampton are important and why his fight for unity against prejudice was so important.

Good thing times have changed, right?

9/10