Movie reviews: Just a decent guy doing his job, or a racist who secretly thrives on hatred?
Jesse Plemons and LaKeith Stanfield in Judas and the Black Messiah
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In the late 1960s, J Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) declared Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) ‘the single greatest threat’ to America. What Hoover meant, of course, was that the revolutionary Black Panther threatened his perception of what America should be: in (15A), Shaka King delivers a vision of what America might have been, had ‘Chairman Fred’ not been betrayed by the FBI informant Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield). The bare bones of the plot is a matter of historical record, as the car thief O’Neal is recruited by FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) to infiltrate the Black Panthers and undermine Hampton, which in itself provides the movie with its narrative tension: where Hampton is happy to accept O’Neal on his own merits, his fellow Panthers — most notably Judy (Dominique Thorne) — are deeply suspicious of O’Neal’s rapid rise through the ranks. Where the film really scores, however, is in King’s exploration of the era’s political backdrop, and especially Hampton’s doomed bid to unite various factions against the Nixon administration and all that it represents. Daniel Kaluuya is superb here, delivering a wonderfully charismatic Fred Hampton, a visionary man of the people (‘Where there’s people, there’s power.’) who is prickly, pragmatic and unabashed in his belief that revolution comes from the barrel of a gun. LaKeith Stanfield is also impressive as the traitorous O’Neal, his performance brilliantly protean as O’Neal adapts his persona to the needs and expectations of whatever company he happens to find himself in, while Jesse Plemons is equally hard to pin down as the FBI agent Mitchell, a stolid family man who may just be a decent guy doing his job, or else a racist who secretly thrives on fomenting hatred. A powerful, lyrical account of a violent, tragic revolutionary, Judas and the Black Messiah is a timely and gripping drama. (internet release)
