Movie Review: 88

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: February 17th, 2023 / 01:53 AM

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Brandon Victor Dixon, Naturi Naughton, Orlando Jones, Thomas Sadoski, Michael J. Harney, Amy Sloan, Jon Tenney, Kenneth Choi, Kelly McCreary, Amanda Seales, Jeremiah King, Anthony Lee Medina, Pegah Rashti, Brian Norris, Vinny Chhibber, Shellye Broughton, William Fichtner
Writer: Eromose
Director: Eromose
Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Release Date: February 17, 2023

88 manages to pack an enormous amount of ideas into its two-hour running time. The film is articulate and well-acted. However, like its protagonist, Femi Jackson (Brandon Victor Dixon), it doesn’t ultimately know what it ought to do with all it has on its hands.

Femi is the financial director for the political SuperPAC One-USA, which supports U.S. Presidential candidate Harold Roundtree (Orlando Jones). Femi is progressive, though middle-of-the-road compared to his pregnant wife Maria (Naturi Naughton). (The two have an argument over the social obligations of the fictional nation Wakanda that is very funny and well-observed.)

88 provides a helpful explanatory cartoon about Citizens United and SuperPACs, narrated by the movie’s director/writer, Eromose. This is provided within the story by TV news anchor Ron Holt (William Fichtner), who is interviewing Roundtree.

Roundtree is running as a Democrat, but is on the conservative side, with his defense of undisclosed campaign contributions and belief in a system that sounds like, as Holt puts it, something close to trickle-down economics.

This bothers Maria, but not Femi. What does puzzle him is the fact that about seventy-five percent of the donations to One-USA for Roundtree contain a number combination that adds up to “88.”

For those who know what this is code for in the real world, it’s code for that here as well. For those unacquainted with this neo-Nazi signifier, prepare for some education.

Femi’s investigation of this leads him down a rabbit hole that draws in friends and colleagues, along with a lot of worthy philosophical clashes.

Filmmaker Eromose succeeds in making political disputes onscreen engrossing and even suspenseful. For one thing, the characters all can point to plenty of recognizable actual issues; for another, everyone expresses themselves in ways people actually talk.

The tangle of different types of racism and economic inequality that overlap and diverge are examined as part of 88’s narrative, and we follow along.

We can easily see why talents like Dixon, Naughton, Jones, Fichtner and more signed on to act in 88. They all have plenty to play in roles that have nuance and depth.

But Eromose, for all his skill in exploring multiple sides of the quandaries, has a couple of fundamental hurdles. For one, we never get a convincing explanation of why the donations are given in the precise manner that attracts Femi’s attention in the first place, since it seems like the only people who’d ever make a connection would have to have Femi’s job.

For another, 88 has a climax that more or less trails off. Despite the music score by Joe Kraemer, which has hints of Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann, and the paranoia injected by the shooting style, we gradually lose our sense of tension.

88 is smart and entertaining. It just has a lot of loose ends, and not enough of a conclusion.

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