88 (2022) Movie Review: “It doesn’t matter where the money comes from if no one ever looks,” a character says at one point in Eromose’s latest feature film, 88. It’s the sort of scene that would almost make anyone draw comparisons from enthralling investigative dramas such as “The Parallax View.” While the conspiracy angle to the story is very much there in this 120-minute-long thriller, it never transforms into anything compelling enough on screen because of an overabundance of tonal shifts.
Eromose’s 88 follows the story of Femi Jackson (Brandon Victor Dixon), a determined analyst who is one day hired by ‘One USA.’ The position he’s offered is that of a new Financial Director. ‘One USA,’ as you might’ve guessed, is a Democratic super PAC – which is short for political action committee – gearing up intensive fundraising for its preferred 2024 candidate, Harold Roundtree (Orlando Jones).
On the other hand, Femi’s wife, Maria (Naturi Naughton), remains deeply skeptical of all the candidates, while she casually dismisses the ‘surface level’ achievements of Marvel’s “Black Panther.” It actually makes for a good enough analogy when you think of the film’s themes of white supremacists funding an African-American Democratic candidate, but more on that later. Somewhere between these sorts of arguments about race and representation, though, Maria does seem happy at the promise of Femi embracing a steady job as he recovers from a rough phase of alcoholism.
The biggest drawback of “88” remains in how it doesn’t fully commit to showing its protagonist’s obsession with discovering the nuances of the campaign more vigorously. From an early point on itself, you sense that there’s a part of himself that Femi sees in Roundtree. The push and pull between his morals and his own personal biases would have provided for a fascinating character dilemma – a perfect recipe needed to make such conspiracy thrillers explosively stick (think about Kevin Costner’s character from “JFK”).
When he gradually starts seeing a pattern over One USA’s earnings, he inevitably comes across some patterns in donations that don’t look right at all. Rather than building upon that intrigue by letting us spend time with the character in his personal space, the film throws a scene that seems directly out of some ridiculed YouTube video. Femi sits down with a guy and tells him how all the amounts from singular people within the PAC’s funneled NGOs add up to the number 88. The guy helps him look at the significance of the number by showing its place among fascist symbolism and how it all leads up to a dark money trail led by a shrouded neo-Nazi organization.
The film undoubtedly remains a fascinating watch, if not for its unoriginal central idea, then at least for how it decides to show it. Eromose wrote, directed, and edited 88, which is why some of the overindulgences do feel a bit tacky. It is extremely commendable to see a voice as exciting as his attempt to demonstrate how modern mechanisms of bypassing the electoral game to push fascist ideology are inextricably linked with the history of black racism in America itself. But here, he seems to approach the story with neither enough grace to make it emotionally work nor with filmmaking ambition nearly solid enough to make a conspiracy thriller stay afloat.
At an early point in the film, we see an African American and a South Korean dude have a discussion about prejudices in American society, where they stumble upon their own deeply seethed racism towards understanding each other. It’s scenes like these that stand out. But most of these seem like a product of a tonal imbalance that even the political talking points of the film couldn’t harness. Similarly, at an early point in the film, we get an animated breakdown of how exactly PACs function at funding candidates without coming under any direct scrutiny – it’s a rather clever way of visually reinforcing your film’s central exposition dump scene.
Unfortunately, the concurrent filmmaking choice of sloppily interlacing clips from historical accounts (some of which don’t even have a direct influence on the US diaspora) waters down the storytelling impact. The desperate drive of supremacists evolving to stay relevant by pushing their agenda into mainstream politics very much exists. But when facts, albeit intertwined with good intentions, fail at coalescing into a coherent narrative, the result is often a movie you don’t know whether to take at face value or be intellectually riveted by.
Why would white supremacists want to fund their money behind an African American candidate set to become the next U.S. President? It’s an idea that is as stupid as it sounds, yet no longer one that the liberals or the socialists of today can turn a blind eye to. Somewhere among fighting these ideological battles, the so-called neoliberal forces have superficially embraced the psyche behind identity politics. However, the blaring subject needs an approach that finds an echo powerful enough to make people realize about the dangers of turning a blind eye to the issue during these delusory times.
Aryan Vyas is a film critic who shares an equal fascination towards science and philosophy. Alike most cinephiles, he too believes that films carry the potential of acting as windows to peep into different cultures in search for the human condition. He has written for publications such as High on Films, Film Companion and Asian Movie Pulse. Through his write-ups, he looks at the artform through a sociopolitical lens, as he believes art is always better consumed knowing the subtext.
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