Foster Boy Review: An Emotional Legal Drama That Calls For Change

Release date: September 25, 2020
Running time: 109 minutes
Starring:  Shane Paul McGhie, Matthew Modine, Michael Hyatt, Louis Gossett Jr., Julie Benz

Michael (Modine) is a high-powered lawyer and Jamal (McGhie) is a young man who has been imprisoned after years of abuse in the foster care system.  However, when Michael is assigned to defend Jamal in his civil lawsuit, he gets more than he bargained for.  Together they have to overcome their differences to find justice and expose the foster care system.

Foster Boy seeks to show injustice and disparity and it does this right from the very start. The film does a great job of highlighting the very different lives Michael and Jamal live with a simple juxtaposition that is highly effective.  There are lots of little touches in Foster Boy that are similarly effective.  The film has some really good writing that focuses on the language that we use.  It carefully picks words to highlight charged language in everyday conversation and it also does a good job of touching on the legal process and implicit bias.  Additionally, as a legal drama, there are some good examples of games and showmanship that can happen during a legal proceeding, although some of the more extreme examples would not fly in court.  But it does have some actual scenes that highlight legal procedure that I was pleasantly surprised to see.  

And Foster Boy has some very good performances, notably from Shane Paul McGhie as Jamal.  He has to play a complicated, layered, and broken character and he does a good job of eliciting emotion and wearing his pain on his sleeve.  Matthew Modine as the high powered lawyer Michael is another strong performance, one that passes the eye test for a lawyer but also provides an entertaining and dramatic courtroom presence.  The remaining characters are all useful to the story, but tend to be good or evil depending on the side they represent.  Jamal and Michael are more complicated, but the remaining characters seem to be placed for the purposes of the story with little nuance.  And the most important name associated with this movie is Shaquille O'Neal, who gets executive producer credit.  I wish that the film would have had more of Shaq, like an intro message or an outro message from the big man.  But one thing that I suspect Shaq had influence on is the hard hitting subject matter and great music.  The film has really entertaining music with some hip-hop and rock thrown in to set the scene.  

And although the writing is generally good and emotional, there is some that goes over the top.  The story can have some very emotional scenes, but also go off the rails at other times with a tale of corporate greed and the ends that companies will go to protect the bottom line.  Foster Boy's desire to create drama and influence emotions leads it to craft a story that is merely inspired by true events.  There is plenty that is done here for the cameras and court scenarios that play out in ridiculous fashion.  For a movie that does so much right with writing and legal procedure at the start, it is a little disappointing that it doesn't stick to this and moves into a more made for Hollywood depiction of the law.  It feels like a two hour television legal drama, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but not what I was hoping for.  Those shows are definitely entertaining and touch on important issues, but with all the horror stories that exist in the foster care system, a movie that more closely followed a foster care child would have been more effective.  I wanted to see real examples of the injustices and an actual company that was responsible for them; what Foster Boy does is craft a convenient and dramatic story to highlight issues in the system.  Which again, is not necessarily a bad thing, it just could have been more powerful if it had a tighter factual basis.

Foster Boy uses its sympathetic protagonist, raw emotions, and dramatic moments to call for change for those little voices that cannot speak up.  

Rent it.

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