“Judas and the Black Messiah,” one of the big remaining question marks for the 2021 Oscars, has been sneakily screening for critics the last few weeks or so. Tonight it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
The film tells the true story of how car thief-turned-FBI informant William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) infiltrated the Black Panther Party and helped the feds take down Panther leader Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). If you’ve seen the trailer, you can already sense some major ’70s American cinema vibes going for it. It turns out, Sidney Lumet’s shadow looms large in ‘Judas,’ a muscular, if messily disjointed, jaunt into gritty crime territory for director Shaka King —whose only other film directing credit was for the middling 2013 indie “Newlyweeds.” Better watch Lumet’s under-appreciated 1979 masterpiece, “Prince of the City,” than delve into King’s cliche-ridden ripoff.
King’s sprawling 130 minute ‘Judas’ features two very strong performances from Kaluuya (although I couldn’t understand half the things that were coming out of the British-born actor’s mouth) and, particularly, Stanfield as the morally conflicted informant. Throughout this crime epic, a slew of actors come and go, which leads to there being not much room to fully sketch out key characters, but Stanfield’s William remains in almost every scene as the film is seen through his perspective.
The story itself isn’t anything new, we’ve had countless dramas like ‘Judas’ over the last 100 years of movies, from “White Heat,” and “The Departed,” to “American Gangster,” and “Donnie Brasco,” the latter which ‘Judas’ most closely resembles — almost every one of these mentioned films has the informant eventually turning into a conflicted mess and wondering if he is doing the right thing. The moral dilemma of Stanfield’s O’Neal is meant to be conflict at the heart of ‘Judas,’ but its outcome gets revealed in the film’s opening, stripping away any of the tension needed to sustain our unabated attention throughout this overlong film.