There’s a part of me that recognizes that going to see something like 12 Mighty Orphans truly represents my return to movie theaters after the pandemic started. It’s not that it’s a bad movie so much as is it not the kind of movie I would normally go to see. Sports stories aren’t my thing any more than sports generally are, and this one didn’t seem to be getting a lot of notice as it was anyway. I saw the trailer maybe once and that was it.
But I went anyway because it may have been good and I wouldn’t know unless I went to see it.
12 Mighty Orphans tells the true story of a football team playing for a Texas orphanage in the heart of the Great Depression/Dust Bowl. Quite frankly, the time period is a bit nebulous in many ways. As narrated by Martin Sheen (who also executive produced), we meet football coach and World War I veteran Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson) who is moving with his wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw) and daughter to his new job. He’ll be coaching a football team for an orphanage while teaching math and science. She’ll be teaching English and music. No sooner do the Russells arrive when they meet first new orphan Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker) and the orphanage’s disciplinarian/print plant manager Frank Wynn (Wayne Knight). Frank really believes in corporal punishment and how the orphans are there to learn a very basic trade from him and doesn’t see the need for a football program. Hardy’s father died under unclear circumstances and his mother abandoned him, leading him to the orphanage. He’s sullen and mean.
However, there are some bright spots. Most of the features orphans are fairly friendly, and there’s always Sheen’s Doc Hall, the orphanage’s in-house physician who doesn’t take any money and soon becomes Rusty’s defensive coordinator/assistant coach. Due to state requirements, only 12 of the orphans qualify to even play as a high school team, and they tend to be smaller than their various opponents. It will be up to Rusty to figure out a way to make a cohesive unit out of the group as well as find creative ways to win ball games against larger opponents with a lot more players and resources than the Mighty Mites actually have.
Quite frankly, if you’ve seen one sports movie, you’ve probably seen this one. Wilson and Sheen are their general charming selves, and the various players that get some character development (most of which goes to Walker’s Hardy) do OK, but this is not a subtle movie. Apparently, this is a world where everybody picks on orphans for the crime of existing, and you can spot the movie’s villains very easily, whether its Knight’s Frank, a man who just wants to see the team disband, or an opposing coach who says in his very first scene how awful it is that women can vote. Rusty has various flashbacks to his time in the trenches of World War I that don’t seem to get much attention, and we’re told Doc is a drunk, but aside from taking a swig from a flask every so often, he doesn’t seem to be drunk at all. Meanwhile, Robert Duvall gets his name in the opening credits, but I think he only actually appears in one scene as a supportive benefactor who has some soft-spoken lines and little else. Heck, the actor playing FDR might have gotten more screentime than Duvall.
If anything, the movie hits the familiar beats, and when it has to do more, like one hysterically awful scene where one orphan’s long-absent mother shows up and tearfully tries to take the boy she abandoned home with her, and her son who hasn’t seen her in years isn’t really interested. Of the kids, Hardy Brown gets the most attention, perhaps because he had the most interesting overall story, or perhaps it was just how Brown was one of two to actually make it to the NFL and had the best career there. This is a movie that tries too much while basically telling the same story as Secretariat where an inspiration underdog sporting event somehow lifted people during a trying time. This one was all told rather average and far too familiar.
Grade: C
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