Judas and the Black Messiah 4K 2021

History, of course, is written by the victors, but in real life things are much more complicated. The BLM movement seems to have set a certain fashion: blacks are pushing through all manner of biased movies. Hear us, powerful men of Hollywood! In “Judas and the Black Messiah” they tried to put themselves on a par with the early Christian martyrs, presenting a kind of gospel of the Black Panthers. In practice, the film, which tells the story of bygone days, addresses modern (or yesterday's, to be more precise) America, where blacks are still suffering and the establishment swings from liberal Democrats to redneck Republicans. Given that the pandemic continues, Warner Bros. decided to release “Judas...” on its HBO Max platform and promote it in every way possible as potential Oscar bait: such a radical goal and righteousness coming out of every crevice.

“Judas and the Black Messiah” is an adaptation of the slogan ‘I am a revolutionary!’. At the center of the story is William O'Neil, a petty criminal and captain of the Black Panthers, and now a secret informant for the FBI. As it turns out, he was an “assassin” in a group of black extremists. The view of those events presented in the movie is a kind of inversion of Spike Lee's “Black Klan”. A black man starts supporting some government officials, and while a tidy special agent declares that “the Klan and the Panthers are one and the same,” the viewer is kind of supposed to wonder.

Clearly, the script contains a lot of social subtexts, but it's impossible to convey them. The culprit is the desire to humanize the central character. Although the label of Judas is easy to attach to William, who managed to sell the charismatic leader of the Black Panthers for 300 dollars, the movie tried to make him contradictory. This is fundamentally wrong: duality in his character and does not smell; it is rather frightening moral detachment, which leads to misunderstanding of his person for the audience.

There is little tragedy in the film, and even less of a biblical motif. Yes, the leader of the black revolution may be a martyr, but there is little of interest in his fate: he died defending his principles... and nothing more? Yes, this is worthy of respect, but there are quite a few such people, and Judas and the Black Messiah fails to reveal one reason or another why this story is worthy of a screen adaptation: either way, the distortions of motivations are there, and the film lacks power. As a piece of historical filmmaking, a biopic or even a film for general development, it's not bad, but in a more general sense “Judas and the Black Messiah” is a neutered version of Sorkin's “The Trial of the Chicago Seven”: instead of focusing on poignant themes, the authors imagined nothing and resorted to a weak political drama instead of a manifesto.