'Judas And The Black Messiah' Review

Can you murder a revolution?

“Why don’t you live for the people. Why don’t you struggle for the people. Why don’t you die for the people.”

~ Fred Hampton, from The Assassination of Fred Hampton

Judas and the Black Messiah is the story of two men at the center of the Black Panther movement in Chicago during the late 60s’.

Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), is the young chairmen of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and a stirring orator and radical. William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) is a petty car thief-turned FBI informant. O’Neal finds himself working for FBI agent Roy Mitchell (the ever-ominous Jesse Plemons).

After his rather clumsy failed car theft attempt—he tries to steal a car from members of the Crowns gang by impersonating an FBI agent—O’Neal agrees to Mitchell’s terms. It’s better than spending six years in prison, or so it seems at the time. Soon he joins the Black Panther Party and starts to get closer to the Chapter’s inner circle.

O’Neal is a clever informant. He convinces Mitchell to give him a car so that he can drive Hampton around. Hampton can’t drive himself due to all the heat. Soon enough, O’Neal is in the inner circle, rubbing shoulders with Hampton and his lieutenants, and eventually rising up to the position of security chief, all while feeding the FBI with information. He also has a new car, a steady flow of cash, and is living the good life. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

What O’Neal—and Mitchell even—don’t realize, is just how far the FBI is willing to go to shut down the Panthers.

Mitchell works under J. Edgar Hoover (a weirdly made-up Martin Sheen) who views the Black Panther Party—and apparently black people in general—as one of the greatest threats to American national security out there. Hoover, we learn, will stop at nothing to destroy whatever he perceives as a threat.

What follows is tragic. The rise and fall of Fred Hampton is far too brief.

One thing missing from the film, right up until the end, is the fact that Hampton was only 20 years old (and 21 when he died) and O’Neal just 17. These were boys. It’s hard to have much sympathy for O’Neal by the end of the movie, even if he didn’t realize how deadly his betrayal would become. He’s a traitor—the titular Judas—but for all his cavalier, self-centeredness, he was only 17. He was, in many ways, a victim of the system the same as Hampton, manipulated and used up and discarded.

Both Kaluuya and Stanfield are brilliant in their respective roles.

Kaluuya’s Hampton is educated, charismatic and brash. He’s willing to place himself in whatever dangerous situation he needs to in order to further the cause. He’s willing to antagonize his audience by mocking the African pride movement, and talks openly about killing “pigs” and how he’s more comfortable with a gun than a dashiki. Hampton’s revolution would be a bloody one, though many of his efforts in the community paint a rather different picture. He wants to feed and educate kids. One of his final acts is to try and build a medical clinic. When O’Neal suggests blowing up City Hall, Hampton calls him crazy and the two almost come to blows. For all his talk of revolution, Hampton spends more time building bridges rather than enacting violence, though the same cannot be said for all of his followers.

While the film depicts many powerful moments of Hampton’s stirring oratory, I wish we’d spent a little more time with him and his eventual partner, Deborah (Dominique Fishback, who is also excellent) and just his life in general. There’s a sense by the end of the film that we still don’t really know Hampton. He’s enigmatic, reserved, even withdrawn when he’s not onstage in front of a crowd. He says he’ll die for the people because he lives for the people, but I can’t help wondering if we’ve been given too shallow—or narrow—a portrait of this young idealist.

I wish also that we’d spent more time learning about his various efforts at unity against a common enemy. There is, for instance, a segment in which Hampton manages to unite the Black Panther Party with William "Preacherman" Fesperman of the Young Patriots Organization and José Cha Cha Jiménez, the founder of the Young Lords.

The Young Patriots Organization was a leftist group made up of mostly poor, white southerners who moved from the Appalachia region to escape poverty. The film doesn’t really get into those details, and makes it look more like a group of rednecks who could just as easily be right-wingers. The film doesn’t delve much into the Young Lords—a Puerto Rican / Latino gang-turned-activist group—either. And other than a brief moment where this Rainbow Coalition was protesting on the street, Judas and the Black Messiah is content to simply move along. Maybe a deeper look at this coalition would have been an effective way to counter Mitchell’s claims that the Black Panthers were “no different” than the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK would never dream of a Rainbow Coalition—a fairly stark difference if you ask me.

The movie spends a lot of time with Judas, actually. While this might ostensibly be a movie about the life and tragic death of Fred Hampton, it spends just as much time with the man who betrayed him and his dealings with the FBI and Agent Mitchell. Stanfield may not put in the electric, intense performance of Kaluuya, but he’s still riveting in his role.

O’Neal is a raft of emotions. He’s clever and does his best to build trust as he infiltrates the Party. When things get dicey, his stress practically crackles in the air around him. Even as he becomes friends with the people he’s betraying, he always looks out for himself first and foremost. Maybe he even believes in the cause after a while, but he believes in saving his own skin more.

In many ways, we follow his evolution from petty criminal who “doesn’t really think about” things like the death of MLK to a man trembling with remorse and terror as he enacts his final terrible deed. But he’s too much the coward to turn back.

While the more mesmerizing, admirable character is Hampton, and while the most important story here is the life and death of the young activist, the movie is really more about O’Neal. Maybe that’s intentional—the film itself places Judas before the Black Messiah, after all—maybe not. Whatever the case, we follow the trials and tribulations of Bill O’Neal much closer, and in a more complete arc, than those of Fred Hampton.

I won’t spoil any more than that. Judas and the Black Messiah is a powerful film with a horrific final act that shows just how far criminal justice can stray from true justice, and the many struggles black people have faced against a system too often prone to keep them down. It fails in some respects as a deep character portrait of Hampton himself, and never quite gives us the story or necessary context of his rise through the Black Panthers or the origins of his cause and his passion.

But as a story about two men on opposite sides of a struggle, who are both ultimately victims of the very same oppression, it not only works, it’s a damning indictment of a justice system that is anything but just.

Judas and the Black Messiah was directed by Shaka King, with with writing credits going to King, Will Berson and Ken and Keith Lucas. The movie is out now in theaters and HBO Max.

Some discussion points (this is a film club, after all):

• One of the most memorable lines in the film is Hampton’s chant: I AM a revolutionary. This becomes, “You can murder a revolutionary, but you can’t murder a revolution!” But I wonder if this is really true. It seems that, in many ways, the violent, Marxist revolution Hampton envisioned has all but vanished.

• Mitchell was an interesting character also. He doesn’t seem like a racist and certainly he’s uncomfortable with Hoover’s racist line of questioning. He investigated the Klan previously. But he still goes along with his superiors and doesn’t really flinch at breaking the law. What’s your take on this man?

• How would you rank this film compared to something like Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X? It’s been a while since I’ve seen that one but I remember thinking it was really fantastic.

• What are some other movies you’d recommend that follow this subject and theme? Some of my favorites over the years have been Glory, Beloved, and The Color Purple along with Malcolm X. I’d even say Black Panther delves into some of these issues though its superhero framework makes it hit a little less close to home. But I’ve missed some recent ones also—Selma, 12 Years A Slave, and so forth. I need to remedy this.

• The title of this film is absolutely brilliant. The comparisons to Jesus and Judas Iscariot are startling, though Jesus never called for violent revolution. Right down to the 40 pieces of silver that the Romans paid Judas to betray Christ, and even the final acts of both O’Neal and Judas—ultimately unable to cope with their guilt. I can see why the filmmakers decided to frame the movie, in some sense, around the analogy.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook. Thanks for reading!