Fred Hampton’s preternatural ability to bring potential enemies and rivals together made him dangerous to an America all too happy with the racist status quo. So he became yet another entry in the “Black Messiah” christening sweepstakes the FBI kept awarding after their prior candidates for the title were assassinated. Hampton would be assassinated as well, on December 4, 1969, exactly 20 months after the last “Black Messiah,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. O’Neal played a large role in facilitating this tragedy, providing Hampton’s apartment layout and even doing a bit of the FBI’s dirty work a few hours before. Since he was a trusted confidant whose ultimate goal was betrayal, the Biblical allusion in the title is an appropriate one.Judas and the Black Messiah 2021 Movie Download.
Though he’s not as fleshed out as Jesus is in the Good Book, Judas remains perhaps the most important supporting character in the Gospels. Here, however, Judas is technically the lead, which wouldn’t be a problem if the script by director Shaka King and Will Berson had made him as compelling as Hampton. Instead, much of the role languishes in one-note scenes between him and the FBI agent who’s holding jail time over his head. In the recreation that opens the film, O’Neal appears in the PBS documentary, “Eyes On the Prize 2,” saying he trusted Mitchell and even saw him as a figure to emulate. Little of that comes through in the scenes between Plemons and Stanfield, though there are moments where it appears the film may deepen this fraught relationship. A scene where Mitchell invites O’Neal to his home and offers him the good Scotch is rife with potential for examining how an act of implied White civility could engender trust; instead the scene ends with some clunky dialogue about money.
We also spend too much time within the FBI. Despite the excellent cinematography by Sean Bobbitt and the editing by Kristan Sprague, these sequences are not as interesting as anything featuring the Black Panthers and their goals. As “MLK/FBI” showed, J. Edgar Hoover took an active role in trying to squash any type of Black attempt to force the country to provide equality and reckon with its racial and economic sins.