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Judas and the Black Messiah Movie Review

Judas and the Black Messiah is a 2021 biographical drama film directed by Shaka King and Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield. The movie is solid, albeit nothing exemplary.

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“America’s on fire right now and until the fire is extinguished

don’t nothin’ else mean a goddamn thing“

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Offered a plea deal by the FBI, William O’Neal infiltrates the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party to gather intelligence on Chairman Fred Hampton. This is one of those black history movies that have become rather familiar by now and they lost their edge. I certainly found some elements here excellent, but for the most part it did not grip like it did most critics.

The movie has some shades of ‘The Departed’, but it’s not as entertaining as that movie is, though it is a bit more emotional overall. The highlight here is the acting. Daniel Kaluuya is excellent per usual and his Fred Hampton is quite memorable and well realized. Jesse Plemons is also quite good. The highlight, though, has to be Lakeith Stanfield whose performance here consists of conflicted emotions powerfully played out on his face. He is so great, in fact, that he entirely stole the show from everybody else and elevated the material.

Judas and the Black Messiah isn’t particularly well directed as Shaka King’s work here is only okay. The same goes for the pacing, which the movie fails at as it’s overstuffed with too many speeches and preaching that took me out of it honestly. The best scenes are the dramatic scenes with the conflicts in emotion and some discussions here and there, but overall too much of the movie consisted of meetings and rallies and so on.

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The film did not appeal to me as much as ‘BlacKkKlansman’ for instance as that Spike Lee movie was not only an interesting historical event, but one that was elevated by a brisk pace and a very riveting outcome. Here, everything is slower, too much of the movie isn’t concerned with the most important characters and only the third act is truly excellent while the rest struggled to maintain momentum, especially the first third or so.

Judas and the Black Messiah has a strong third act and a powerhouse performance from Lakeith Stanfield who stole the show from everybody else in an intriguing role. But most of the others were far less interesting, and although the film deals with an important historical event, it mostly failed to garner my attention because the pacing is off and there were too many boring speeches that stopped the momentum in its tracks.

My Rating – 3.5