Brian Banks

The title Brian Banks shows a glaring lack of imagination and low marketing savvy. How many moviegoers are going to remember the aspiring NFL player imprisoned in 2002 over a bogus high school rape charge, whose claim of innocence attracted some media attention in 2012? Not many.

It’s an engaging enough film, directed by Tom Shadyac, the former Hollywood hotshot who once helmed Patch Adams and other hit comedies with Eddie Murphy and Jim Carrey. For Brian Banks, Shadyac has recruited Greg Kinnear to play the lawyer who eventually takes on Banks’ case and Morgan Freeman as his prison mentor. The lead is the appealing and accomplished Aldis Hodge, who’s had memorable roles in Hidden Figures, Straight Outta Compton and a lot of TV shows.

For all that, Brian Banks still lives in “Movie of the Week” territory, that realm of earnest, linear films that try to humanize Big Social Issues — in this case, the “broken justice system,” as characters repeatedly remark. In the film, as in real life, Banks is just 16 when he’s pressured into a plea deal that sends him to prison on shaky, uninvestigated testimony from the alleged victim. The movie picks up the story once Banks is on probation, when he badgers the nonprofit California Innocence Project into looking into his case.

You know where this is going, even if you’ve never heard of Banks, and the getting there is sufficiently emotional. If the questions the movie raises linger longer than the tears, its mission is accomplished.