Review: Judas and the Black Messiah

A young man is tasked by the government to infiltrate an organisation deemed to be a threat to society. He's young, he's still unformed in many ways, which makes him a perfect undercover operative. It also means that the deeper he goes, the more he comes to connect and bond with those around him - those he's been ordered to betray. When the moment comes, will he side with them or the government that's pulling his strings? And will he be able to live with himself either way?

Part of the thrill of Judas and the Black Messiah is seeing this familiar story (I'm thinking Donnie Brasco, but any one of a number of "inside man" movies fit the mold - and that's just mob movies) turned on its head. In those movies, Bill O'Neill (LaKeith Stanfield) would be the hero, the tormented man who nevertheless is doing right, while Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) would be a bad guy who maybe, if he was lucky, would be allowed a shred of dignity as he was taken down.

In the real world, Hampton was a 60s civil rights organiser in Chicago doing good for his community but organising social services and providing a real alternative to the mainstream. It was just that his community - and any other minority community - was seen as an enemy of the state by the head of the FBI (thumbs up to the casting director who put Martin Sheen in that role) and had to be kept down and crushed by any means up to and including direct assassination. 

O'Neill was just a petty criminal in the wrong place at the wrong time who ended up supplying information on the Black Panthers to his occasionally ambivalent FBI handler (Jesse Plemons) while gradually realising he was in a hole he wasn't going to be able to escape from.

There's a gripping story here and an important history lesson to be told, and it's hard to fault the film for choosing the history over the drama. O'Neill's plight as an undercover agent is rarely illustrated; after passing one early test, his loyalty is never suspected (though judging by another subplot, the Panthers definitely had a problem as far as being too trusting). We first see him running a scam where he pretends to be an FBI agent, and while it seems like there's a promising thread there - was there a part of him that liked working for the Man - it's never followed up.

Hampton as played by Kaluuya is a speechifying force of nature, which is both completely appropriate and leaves him more as a symbol to admire than a man to understand. His relationship with poet and activist Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) provides another angle, but the contradiction between his public persona proclaiming he wasn't afraid to die for the people and his private life starting a family could have been a film in itself.

This film does so well at conjuring up a time and place that at times these flaws feel less like faults in the storytelling and more just the limitations of a two hour film. The only time it really stumbles is with the ages of the protagonists: both Hampton and O'Neill were barely into their twenties, angry young men raging against the world, both having their lives taken away - literally in one case, in the other every way but - by a system that crushes the hopes of its people as a simple matter of course.

- Anthony Morris