Review: Inspirational football drama '12 Mighty Orphans' loads on the cliches as it plucks the heart strings

Sports stories don’t come more ready-made for a heart-tugging movie than the Mighty Mites, a scrappy orphanage team that was the underdog story of Depression-era Texas — and director Ty Roberts delivers the melodrama in buckets.

It’s 1938, at the height of the Great Depression, when Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson) arrives at the Masonic Hall orphanage, with his wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw) and their daughters in tow. Rusty has been hired as a math teacher and football coach for the teen boys living there, while Juanita is assigned to tutor the girls.

Rusty discovers the boys are stigmatized because they’re orphaned, and exploited for their labor by another teacher, Frank Wynn (Wayne Knight). Rusty enlists the orphanage’s kindly but often inebriated medic, Doc Hall (Martin Sheen), as an assistant coach to teach the boys the sport — and draws up some innovative plays, such as the “spread” offense, to capitalize on the boys’ speed and neutralize the other teams’ size. More importantly, though, Rusty — once an orphan himself — teaches the boys to rely on each other, to believe in themselves.

Roberts, who wrote the screenplay with Lane Garrison (who plays a flamboyant rival coach) and Kevin Meyer, bathes the film in a nostalgic sepia-tone glow, through game and training montages that check all the boxes of the sports-movie cliche list. Heck, he even throws in a rousing courtroom scene, when Rusty must argue to keep the state’s sports authority from revoking the Mites’ league membership.

There are some curious embellishments, like a cameo by Robert Duvall, comedian Ron White as the local sheriff, a turn by Treat Williams as a prominent sportswriter, and even scenes involving Franklin Roosevelt (Larry Pine), following the team’s exploits from afar. But when “12 Mighty Orphans” is grounded in the lives of its boys — most notably the stubborn Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker) — the movie’s determined plucking of the heart strings somehow strikes a chord.

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’12 Mighty Orphans’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 18, at the Cinemark 24 Jordan Landing (West Jordan), Megaplex Theatres at The District (South Jordan), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), Megaplex at The Junction (Ogden), Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi), Megaplex Geneva (Vineyard), Scera (Orem), Coral Cliffs Cinema (Hurricane) and Sunset Stadium 8 (St. George). Rated PG-13 for violence, language, some suggestive references, smoking and brief teen drinking. Running time: 118 minutes.