Brian Banks Review
PG-13: Thematic content and related images, and for language
Studios: Bleecker Street, ShivHans Pictures, Gidden Media
Run Time: 1 Hour and 39 Minutes
Director: Tom Shadyac | Screenwriter: Doug Atchison
Cast: Aldis Hodge, Greg Kinnear, Sherri Shepherd, Melanie Liburd
This is the inspirational true story of Brian Banks (Aldis Hodge), an All-American high school football star committed to USC who finds his life upended when he is wrongly convicted of a crime he didn't commit. Despite the lack of evidence, Banks is railroaded through a broken justice system and sentenced to a decade of prison and probation. Years later, with the support of Justin Brooks (Greg Kinnear) and the California Innocence Project, Banks fights to reclaim his life and fulfill his dreams of playing in the NFL.
If I type out this review, maybe they’ll stop sending me emails about this movie. If you are an American film critic, chances are this movie has been relentlessly flooding your inbox for months, reminding you that football drama exists. But the joke’s on them: I saw this last month. And still, I’ve been getting a crap ton of emails! You know what? Fine! I’ll review it so my inbox can finally know peace.
Set in 2003, Brian Banks had all the makings of a college athlete. He was an exceptional football star who had a scholarship to USC, but when he’s convicted for a sexual assault crime that he didn’t commit, all those dreams are whisked away as he’s sent to prison for a decade. After his release, Banks sets out to find justice with assistance from Justin Brooks (Greg Kinnear) and an organization called the California Innocence Project to help clear his name so he can enter a state of livelihood again.
No disrespect to the living figure, whose true story most likely is as incredible as it sounds, but Brian Banks is one of the most derivative and cliched dramas released this year. I don’t want to go on another tirade about White filmmakers telling Black stories, but when you’ve got the director of Patch Adams, Bruce Almighty, and Evan Almighty at the helm of a biopic drama, along with the screenwriter of Akeelah and the Bee -- who hasn’t written a movie since Akeelah and the Bee until now -- then you get exactly what you bargained for: a mediocre drama with simplistic dialogue, generic plotting, and scenes so obnoxiously confident that they’re saying something meaningful. Meanwhile, they can’t even tell a cohesive story.
I would start off with something like, “Aldis Hodge is giving it his all in the leading role as Banks”... if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve seen him at his full potential in other projects that leap and bound over his performance in this. Very few people reading this review have seen the Sundance hit Clemency -- which won’t be officially released until December -- but his performance in that is so moving and full of nuances that he had me tearing up sometimes. He doesn’t bring that same strength here, for he’s coasting, delivering a serviceable performance more than anything. It’s not particularly his fault, for it’s the direction he’s given that prevents him from excelling past this conventional script. I bet the real figure is a complex guy, but the way his story is told -- by applying every cliche in the book -- is a major disservice to Banks himself, making this movie forgettable.
Brian Banks painfully fails at establishing any sort of significance for the lead’s character to make you root for him in this journey that’s larger than him. He has positive traits such as persistence, determination, and kindness, but those characteristics aren’t enough to craft a dimensional character. He’s so one-note that the only reason to root for Banks’ fight for justice is his complexion. As an audience member, you want more than that to be engaged.
Many biopics inherently have a running time of about two hours, but I’ve never seen a biopic with the run time of 97 minutes that so often loses its own train of thought, derailing its own story for the convenience of hopeful montages to sell a soundtrack. For a story about fighting injustice, there are so many scenes where absolutely nothing happens, just non sequitur montages of Banks living his daily life, working out, going out on dates, and being a stand-up person without serving any sort of urgency, let alone substance to the plot. Some scenes could’ve simply been cut, for not only do these moments detract from the urgency of the narrative, but they add another layer to the problem of incoherence within the storytelling. Even when the film is allowing Brian to express his pain, not much logic or significant detail is placed into either the direction or the script to give them any weight.
For example, there is a scene where he goes on a date with a woman named Karina (Melanie Liburd), whom he meets at a friend’s gym, that he takes to the museum. Brian gets a call from his parole officer who tells him that the museum he’s in is placed in a park, and since he’s a registered sex offender, he must go home immediately. Banks tells Karina they have to leave and she understands, for he explained that he’s a registered sex offender several scenes prior. But, as luck would have it, Banks knows of a better place they can go to. In the next scene they’re in a vacant football stadium, walking on the field, conversing with each other. There’s no logic applied to it at all. How did they get there? Who knows? All that matters is that they had the budget for it and it looks good.
While they had the budget to have the cast walk on a football field, making no logistical sense at all, there are areas where that money could’ve gone to good use, such as additional casting to better complement the visual details in the story. Aldis Hodge is 32 years old. He’s playing Banks as a 27-year-old. That’s believable. Hodge has the youthful face for it. But one of the primary visual flashbacks shows him in high school, displaying the incident that caused him to be wrongfully convicted of sexual assault. It would’ve been beneficial to cast a 16-year-old version of this character -- one that looks like Aldis Hodge, or the real Brian Banks for that matter. But because this is a small indie -- one that clearly can’t afford de-aging visual effects -- you’re left with 32-year-old Aldis Hodge dressing as a high schooler, wearing baggy pants and a shirt that’s too large for him. I’m not joking. Watching Hodge portray a teenage Banks during the crucial moment when the crime occurred just takes you out of the movie because you’re too focused on this actor in his 30s dressing as a high schooler.
And please don’t get me started on the flashbacks of Brian’s incarceration because those scenes are so laughably bad that it’s borderline offensive how cliched they are. As the story of Banks’ path to freedom plays out, the film cuts to flashbacks of his incarceration where he learned how to persevere through the magical mystical negro mentorship of Morgan Freeman, whose dialogue is comprised of inspirational Hallmark card quotes to the extent that he inexplicably drops an En Vogue lyric. Even the imagery, where it wants to be so profound in depicting how Banks found a new hope, is so transparently banal that it makes you want to roll your eyes to the back of your skull.
Besides failing at making any part of Banks’ story distinguishable -- let alone logistical -- the film fails at allowing female characters to have any voice given the subject matter, for their purpose in this movie is to play the metaphorical cheerleaders. From the women at the California Innocence Project who persuade Justin Brooks to take Banks’ case because they admire his persistence, to his own mother (played by a wasted Sherri Shepherd) not being given much to do besides giving her son moral support, crying in the background when he’s incarcerated, and most of all, Karina, the love interest of Banks who initially comes on as a survivor of sexual assault, has her express her trauma of dealing with it, only to immediately be sidelined as a cheerleader.
That’s a huge yikes from me, dawg.
The flaws in this run deep, but I keep going back to the script which is such a simplistic and conventional courtroom drama that even the plotted elements are taken out of much stronger features. The lack of detail and logistical sense in storytelling takes this extraordinary story and turns it into a hodgepodge of mediocrity. It clearly means well, but it’s also so obnoxiously confident that it has awards potential that you can sense the Oscar-bait speech from a mile away. Remember that scene in Deadpool where he goes:
That was me in the theater but instead saying, “Oscar-bait speech. He’s going to do an Oscar-bait speech,” as the overbearingly saccharine score by John Debney swells up the moment before an actor delivers their all.
At the end of the day, this movie is egregiously telegraphed, bearing way too many silly and cliched mishaps that lack any proper details to make it even worth a watch. If I was the real Brian Banks, I would’ve been pissed because this is not a good example of having your incredible story depicted. Take notes from The Hurricane; that movie is how you do it.
Brian Banks attempts to be a confident injustice drama, but because of its simplistically contrived screenplay and pedestrian direction, it never rises up to be more than a mediocre movie that clearly deserved much better.
Rating: 2/5 | 47%
