Armageddon Time (2022)
Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) is an eleven-year-old Jewish kid growing up in Queens in 1980 who just wants to draw and be friends with Johnny (Johnny David), the Black kid in his class who gets treated way worse by their teacher for the exact same troublemaking. Paul’s grandpa Aaron (Anthony Hopkins) is the one person who actually believes in his art and tries to teach him to notice injustice instead of looking away from it, but after Paul and Johnny get busted smoking weed, his parents yank him out of public school and dump him into a fancy private school bankrolled by Fred Trump (John Diehl), where the racism is just quieter and better dressed. Johnny, meanwhile, gets pushed into special ed, stops showing up to school, and ends up secretly crashing in Paul’s clubhouse because he’s got nowhere else to go. Aaron dies, Paul spirals under the pressure of everyone’s expectations, and in a moment of “let’s just run away” logic he talks Johnny into stealing a computer with him - they get caught, and Johnny takes the fall alone because he knows Paul actually has a way out and he doesn’t. Paul walks away with zero consequences thanks to his dad’s connections, and the film ends with Reagan winning the election and Paul standing in a room full of future elites, finally getting just how rigged the whole thing is.
I really wanted this one to land, but it feels like I’d watched two different movies stitched together that never quite agreed on what they were trying to say. There’s an ambition here that I respect - James Gray is clearly reaching for something about how the America we’re living in now didn’t spring out of nowhere, that it was quietly assembled in rooms like Forest Manor Prep, funded by men like Fred Trump, cheered on by families who told themselves they were just “giving their kid opportunities.” That’s a genuinely interesting thesis for a semi-autobiographical film to take on. But the movie gestures at it more than it builds it. Every time it gets close to really digging into that idea, it cuts away to another vignette of Paul drawing, or squabbling with his brother, or getting yelled at by Irving, and the political throughline gets diluted instead of sharpened.
The Johnny material is where the film’s conscience actually lives, and it’s also where I felt the most frustrated, because the movie seems to know that and still won’t commit to it. We get glimpses of what he’s up against - special ed, a sick grandmother, foster care workers circling - but always filtered through Paul’s guilt rather than given room to breathe on its own terms. By the time Johnny takes the fall for the robbery, it should feel devastating, and it sort of does, but it also felt like the film cashing in a plot beat rather than the culmination of a relationship it had actually spent time on. I kept wanting one more scene that was just Johnny, without Paul’s perspective hovering over it, and it never came.
Anthony Hopkins, though - he’s operating on a completely different level than the rest of the film, and honestly he’s the reason I’d tell anyone to watch this at all. Aaron is the only character who feels fully lived-in rather than assembled for thematic purposes, Irving (Jeremy Strong) gets there in the final moments. The story Aaron tells Paul about his mother fleeing Ukraine, the quiet insistence that Paul actually look at injustice instead of drawing his way past it - those scenes have a warmth and a moral clarity that the rest of the movie is straining for and doesn’t reach. The second he’s gone, the film loses its center of gravity. Act three feels like it’s drifting from set piece to set piece - the robbery, the interrogation, the election, the Thanksgiving dance - without a strong hand steering them toward a single point.
By the end, with Paul standing in that room of future elites while Fred Trump talks about their destiny for success, I could tell exactly what emotional note the film wanted me to land on. I just don’t think it earned it. A memoir piece and a political indictment are both valid ways to tell this story, but this film keeps switching between them instead of fusing them, and the result feels meandering where it should feel damning. Worth watching for Hopkins alone. Just don’t expect the rest of it to match him.
2.5 out of 5 Stars
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