88: Would-Be Thriller About Neo-Nazis in U.S. Politics Barely Feels Like Fiction
By Liam Lacey
Rating: D
Modern racial conspiracy thrillers, from Jordan Peele’s Get Out to Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, aim at provocative social commentary by playing with the conventions of the horror genre.
In 88, Nigerian-American writer-director, Eromose (a.k.a. Thomas Eromose Ikimi) takes a different tack, harking back to the post-Watergate political dramas of the 70s — The Parallax View, All The President’s Men, The Boys From Brazil — to expose a group of shadowy puppet-masters controlling power and public perception.
While 88 has characters who have lots to say about the history of white supremacy, dark money in politics, and the delusion of fixing a corrupt system from within, this is a stiff, artless effort that barely makes the transition from explanatory journalism to fiction.
Femi Jackson (Brandon Victor Nixon) is a low-key accountant, married to an assertive activist wife, Maria (Naturi Naughton), and a fond but awkward father to a boisterous preteen boy, Ola (Jeremiah King).
Femi, who has had problems with alcohol in the past, now has an important job as the financial director for a presidential campaign of Harold Roundtree (Orlando Jones), a centrist Obama-like Black Democrat, who has been piling up big cash reserves in his Super PAC and is a favourite to take the White House.
One day, Femi notices something strange about all that money rolling in: Most of the donations add up to the number 88. In conversation with his investment blogger friend, Ira Goldstein (Thomas Sadoski), Femi learns that 88 has nothing to do with the number of keys on a piano but is neo-Nazi code. The eighth letter of the alphabet, H, repeated twice, or HH, as in “Heil Hitler.” Why would neo-Nazis support a Black Democratic candidate and why would they leave such obvious traces?
As Femi pursues various leads, we see Roundtree answering questions on a Charlie Rose-style interview show, with host played by William Fichtner. Most of this feels nothing like an interview, but dollops of unfiltered exposition.
Included is the presentation of an animated short film demonstrating the impact of 2010 Citizen’s United ruling that allowed corporations and outside groups to spend unlimited money on candidate’s campaigns. The interview also allows candidate Roundtree to say such baffling gobbledegook as “The media is the most powerful medium in the world.”
Much of the dialogue in 88 feel like cut-and-paste PowerPoint text boxes pretending to be conversations. That starts at the breakfast table, when Maria challenges the politics of a proposed Wakanda-themed birthday party for their son, and her husband’s love of NFL football, because of the owner’s treatment of Colin Kaepernick.
At work, Femi and an Asian-American friend (Kenneth Choi) turn into a conversation about different kinds of minority oppression. Meanwhile, Ola gets in trouble at school for showing classmates a video of police shooting a Black man.
Subplots include Maria’s brother-in-law, a white cop, because, you know, they’re not all bad. And Maria, who works as a loan officer at a bank, gets her moral dander up when a former Black client who carves children’s toys is turned down for a bank loan because of a prior pot-dealing felony.
Along the way, characters never tire of informing each other of well-known historical facts. Did you know Birth of a Nation was a “Hollywood” movie? Did you know Abraham Lincoln, at least early in his career, was an opponent of racial equality and believer in white superiority? I did, thank you.
The are few thrills in this thriller, though Femi occasionally ventures outside the campaign office and his home, including a visit to a dying old conspiracy theorist and writer (Jonathan Weir). Later, he meets a Deep Throat figure from a secret counter group, who is determined to let the whole plot come to fruition so they can expose it.
There’s even one of those absurd scenes where Femi calls his friend Ira to his garage at 5 am, so he can display one of those Beautiful Mind-type cork board demonstrations with strings of yarn connecting bits of paper, which looks like a kit you can buy from Paranoiacs Art Supplies.
Save your time and outrage and instead, read Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, about American billionaires and their ties to the radical right, which doesn’t pretend to be fiction.
CLICK HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s interview with 88’s William Fichtner.
88. Written and directed by Eromose. Starring Brandon Victor Dixon, Naturi Naughton, Orlando Jones, Thomas Sadoski, Michael J. Harney, Amy Sloan, Kelly McCreary, Jon Tenney, Kenneth Choi and William Fichtner. In theatres March 24.