Bosco (2024)

Bosco Review

The Core Quawntay “Bosco” Adams (Joseph) has a thing for puzzles. And running, too. We’re introduced to him as a kid in 1985 Compton (played by Camden Randall), obsessed with 1,000-piece puzzles filled with lions and other wild animals; his father Tootie (Tyrese Gibson), an embittered drug dealer, tells him the real lions are out there in the streets which he says while talking to Vivica A. Fox as Bosco’s mom Willa in the same flashback before we jump ahead to 2006 and Bosco’s arrival at a federal supermax prison in Missouri. Third strike. No more running. “35 years for some fucking weed,” he laments in voiceover.

He wants to meet his child while they’re still a child, not 35 years from now. Nobody should live in a cage without basic decency either, but Bosco figures information is everywhere even here. He picks up on the cadence of Ramos and Hunt’s footsteps, where he can and cannot be seen inside his cellblock and beyond; any security system is only as strong as its weakest link: human beings, he adds later in voiceover. So armed with this innate ability to solve puzzles along with a few lifelines from outside help and Tammy (that part comes later), he hatches an exciting plan towards taking back what’s rightfully his freedom!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? A couple direct references to the Clint Eastwood film “Escape from Alcatraz” (1979) still one of the best prison-escape movies ever made are only a few of the ways in which “Bosco” plants itself within this genre. Last year’s limited series “Escape at Dannemora,” also based on a true story about a strange jailbreak, collected numerous Emmy nominations as well.

Performance Worth Watching: Joseph is the heart of this film he plays the title character, he narrates it; he’s our dramatic connection to real-life Quawntay Adams. But among the strong, if only briefly seen supporting cast, Lewis stands out as Bosco’s neighbor inmate The Bull. We don’t get his whole backstory; we don’t need it. But Lewis gives Bull a swagger that belies the smarter and more damaged man beneath all that tough talk and prison tats (he also briefly crossed paths with his “Bosco” co-star Theo Rossi during Season 6 of “Sons of Anarchy”).

Memorable Dialogue: “People don’t appreciate the freedom that floats on every breeze,” “I might be caged, but I ain’t runnin’ no more” some of Adams’ most powerful lines in Bosco come through his voice-over narration, when he observes his situation with an air of detachment. Yes, it’s true he’s physically jailed. But his mind can still take him places.

Our Take

Suffocating is often too slow a word to describe watching something like this one. Suffocatingly slow is closer to accurate. We’re IN that cell with him and then some. But then again, maybe that’s the point? The starkness in mood it creates for itself and its viewership along with its lack of contact with the outside world beyond flashbacks of when freedom was still his were a few of the more effective choices that helped me find my way into Quawntay “Bosco” Adams’ physical space, but more importantly his headspace. There are some interesting wrinkles of direction and editing, too, that expand that seven-by-twelve supermax cell. When Bosco imagines how he’d take down Ramos the evil prison guard and disable him with a taser, he immediately dismisses the idea in his voice-over which throughout becomes this kind of bulwark against the brutality and awful conditions of his incarceration. In Bosco’s mind we meet a curious young man with easy touches of humor and a cynicism that’s become hard bound; but once we’re inside its planning-and-execution phase there’s also so much to root for since we’ve seen what it put him through. When it comes right down to it, there simply is not enough of this. It ends too soon on us, leaving more than a few questions about how it all went down; although it does leave room for a postscript that brings its main character fully back into reality while showing us how the very freedom he sought finally arrived at its own pace.

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