88– 4 STARS

Now matter what label, color, side, or philosophy you lean towards, put your money on, or vote for, most United States citizens would probably agree that American politics has been rife with conspiracies for decades. Many of those theories are precisely outlandish enough for savvy Hollywood screenwriters to find pithy movie premises for an eternity. The truly fun part is that any single theory, with the right spin, could be crafted and played as a either comedic farce or a terrifying thriller with equal entertainment potential. With 88 from Samuel Goldwyn Films, Legacy filmmaker Thomas Ikimi, better known as Eromose, takes a rich conspiracy concept and runs with it.

LESSON #1: WHAT IF A SECRET ENTITY WAS PLOTTING TO RULE THE WORLD?– Normally, a question like that would fall into someone’s “stop me if you’ve heard this one” schtick of laughable shock value. However, there are verified numbers fanning those flames. A 2013 poll from Public Policy Polling found that 28% of voters believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order.” While the statistical returns break that down by party affiliation (34% of Republicans, 35% of independents, and 15% of Democrats), that’s still more than one out of every four people you share relatives with, work beside, or pass on the street.

Fathom that math for a moment and, next, ponder what it would take for Lesson #1 to come true in the United States of America. How many people of a unified clandestine effort would it take? What kind of person would be the figurehead of such a movement? How much money would that cost to pull it off? 88 immerses itself to enliven those quandaries.

Femi Jackson (Brandon Victor Dixon of Power and The Best Man: The Final Chapters) is the financial director of a Super PAC for the Democratic party managed by Agatha Frost (Amy Call Me Fitz’s Amy Sloan) and Fred Fowlkes (Michael Harney of Orange is the New Black). His pregnant wife Maria (fellow former Power star Naturi Naughton) and pre-teen son at home do not see Femi as often as they would like. Femi is far too busy being super-committed to the cause and, more importantly, devoted to one particular candidate.

Playing it stupendously straight, Orlando Jones is Harold Roundtree, the most popular Democrat in the 2024 Presidential race. Shouldering comparisons to Barack Obama, Roundtree is presented through most of Eromose’s film on observed screens fielding non-softball questions from a Charlie Rose-esque television journalist named Ron Holt, played by veteran character actor William Fichtner. 

LESSON #2: THE IDEAL CANDIDATE CAN BECOME A SYMBOL– Harold Roundtree fashions himself as an “architect” of “destiny” and is saying all the right things on Holt’s hardlining program. One of his longer unflappable replies to the host is reckoning how to inspire people who don’t have his privilege. The ways Roundtree speaks knowledgeably and pointedly on topic after topic is captivating. Femi sees an ideal symbol and eats up his rhetoric with high admiration.

With every pen click, the studious accountant pours over the ledgers and analyzes contributions for the Super PAC. While examining a spiking trend in the last six months, Femi notices a pattern in recurring donations from the same cluster of 501(c)(3) sources. He finds repeating addends that end or add up to the film’s increasingly ubiquitous title number. 

LESSON #3: FOLLOW THE MONEY– With no shame and tremendous respect, 88 borrows the famous catchphrase of All the President’s Men, slaps it right on the poster, and injects it into this modern script. The place to see the names, labels, and faces of those with true agendas in political elections has always been to “follow the money.” Along its murky course, 88 reminds viewers with exposition of the mechanics and processes of Super PACs and the way massive donations are channeled through privacy-protected non-profit entities that can mask original sources.

This is where 88’s labyrinth gets deeper and darker. Femi enlists a trusted outside colleague and investigator friend named Ira (Devotion’s Thomas Sadoski, back in his The Newsroom territory) to help make sense of the data. The more the two decipher, the larger the conspiracy time bomb they find ticking. As one character puts it, betrayal exists that goes to the “soul of the f–king country.” If what Femi and Ira finds means what they think it means and comes from the sources they hypothesize (a reveal best left unspoiled), the question now arises of if Harold Roundtree is an infiltration plant that goes all the way back to Lesson #1.

One half of 88’s energy as a percolating  potboiler comes from Brandon Victor Dixon being able to slow-play Femi’s descent to frenzy. He has to balance shock and resolve without a full-on mental breakdown and would deflate his character. The sharp dialogue delivery of Thomas Sadoski is a pusher complement for Dixon’s lead, as is the family anchoring pushback provided by Naturi Naughton. It all leads to a classic disillusionment and realization exercise for a decent man who has been led astray and must choose a corrective path.  

The other half comes from the unexpected Orlando Jones. The usual funnyman gives an astute and cool-as-a-cucumber performance here that is light years away from his 2000s-era resume of madcap comedic supporting roles in films like Evolution and The Replacements that gave him a wide window of fame. 88 does not work without Orlando Jones creating a figure of stature and composure to deliver Eromose’s scripted snake oil and still come off as a convincing political poster boy.

With a premise right out of the paranoid 1970s or pre-9/11 1990s, much of 88 is tantalizing to watch. Composer Joe Kraemer (The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot), a throwback specialist, hits the brass and snare drum blends to evoke the twisting of patriotism. Pulling triple duty as his own editor, Eromose takes a page from JFK to create a few uptempo montages that splice footage of historical references with voiceover narrations attempting to slather on the layers of motivations and unseen puppeteers. Altogether, this man is a talent to watch as a do-it-all filmmaker.

Where the anxiety of 88 recoils is with the subplots away from the central nefariousness. The sidetracks into Femi’s family life, complete with current social justice reverberations and differences of cultural awareness, slow the narrative’s progress more than they flesh out a crumbling idealist. These segments are part of the reason 88 egregiously stops short of full ignition of its fiery implications. 

LESSON #4: HOW FAR IS ONE WILLING TO GO WITH THEIR THEORIES– Dangling the doom of new masters of money and power, ideological movements hiding universal hypocrisy, and scaffolding how leaders can be corrupted and destroyed along the way, 88 is building and implying the proper breadth of speculation to turn our heads as a discerning audience. Nonetheless, when a movie like 88 lugs around a suggested bombshell this high on the concept scale, there needs to be measurable cinematic payoff of elevated hazard. While intellectually satisfying to a degree, headiness cannot be its sole peak of moral damage. For peril’s sake, you have to let a little, or even a substantial, bit of your mounting suspense go ahead and detonate.