Review: 'The Forever Purge' aims for red-meat catharsis, and commentary about xenophobia on the border — but it feels a little too real to be entertaining

Five movies into “The Purge” franchise, with “The Forever Purge,” and what started as a tight little thriller about mob violence and class warfare has morphed into something else: A blood-drenched predictor of things to come.

It’s a stretch to call James DeMonaco — who has written all five screenplays in the series, and directed the first three — an oracle. It requires no clairvoyance, just cynicism and a cursory knowledge of American history, to guess that things can go bad when angry people with guns get a chance to vent their frustrations. If anything, the lurid machinations in “The Forever Purge” feel a bit dated next to what we watched on the news on January 6th.

In the timeline of the series, the Purge — the annual 12-hour night of unrestrained violence, where all crime including murder is legal (though, it’s noted, government officials above a certain level are exempted) — has returned. So has the right-wing political force that spawned it, the New Founding Fathers of America.

So in a Texas town near the Mexican border, various folks get ready to hunker down and ride out the brutality. The rich Tucker family — the patriarch Caleb (Will Patton), daughter Harper (Leven Rambin), son Dylan (Josh Lucas), and Dylan’s pregnant wife, Cassie (Cassidy Freeman) — closes the iron door and window guards of their sprawling house. Meanwhile, Juan (Tenoch Huerta) and T.T. (Alejandro Edda), undocumented ranch hands who work for the Tuckers, hop on a bus that takes them, along with Juan’s wife, Adela (Ana de la Reguera), to a bunker attached to a nearby church.

The 12 hours pass, and everyone emerges from their hiding spots ready to clean up the mess and start a new day. Soon, though, they find that some people aren’t ready to stop the Purge. Fueled by demagogic leaders, social media, a TV network whose name is never overtly mentioned, and their home arsenals, these folks declare the Purge will go on “ever after” — targeting both the super-rich and immigrants.

After some close calls, including Adela getting caught in a contraption that looks like something from a “Saw” yard sale, the Tuckers and their Mexican acquaintances have to join forces to survive the Ever After factions that have overrun many parts of the nation. Their goal becomes survival, and getting to the Mexican border, which — in an ironic twist that’s as subtle as everything else in DeMonaco’s bruising script — is letting in refugees trying to escape the new Purge.

Mexican-born director Everardo Valerio Gout knows his job is to lay the action and violence on with a trowel, and he throws the red meat to the audience with both fists. He throws every action trope into the mix, including some chase scenes that feel cribbed from “Mad Max,” but without the same visceral thrill.

Whatever quick-hit emotional catharsis Gout and DeMonaco conspire to create through the bloody action, as the innocent Juan and blowhard Dylan must learn to kill, the high is brief and unsustainable. It’s hard to watch a fictional dystopia that looks too much like a freshly filmed documentary.  

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‘The Forever Purge’

★★

Opens Friday, July 2, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, and language throughout. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Zola' turns an epic Twitter thread into a sharply rendered, adults-only story of a stripper caught up in some bad business

A rapid-fire comedy not for the prudish, director Janicza Bravo’s “Zola” finds caustic humor in what many consider to be the craziest story ever told on Twitter.

In 2015, in 144 tweets, A’ziah “Zola” King told of the time she and a “friend” of hers, Stefani, took time off from their work at a strip club to take a weekend trip to Florida — where, as is all too common for Florida, all kinds of crap went down.

As told here, Zola (Taylour Paige, recently seen in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) is a sensible young woman who knows working as a stripper pays better than waitressing — but she has limits, like not doing private shows and not prostituting herself. If only Zola had known, before Stefani (Riley Keough) talked her into going to Florida to dance at some clubs for some fast money, that Stefani did not work under such limitations.

Zola, Stefani, her boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Brand), and a guy (Colman Domingo) whose name Zola would not hear for the first 48 hours of their trip, all pile into an SUV and drive to the Tampa area. While Derek sits at a crappy hotel, the nameless guy takes Zola and Stefani to a nicer hotel — which is when Zola learns that the guy is Stefani’s pimp, and that the guy expects Stefani and Zola to make some money for him. (These scenes have some explicit male nudity, and are not for the squeamish.)

Bravo — who brought the discomfort-centered comedy “Lemon” to Sundance in 2017 — and her co-writer, Jeremy O. Harris, spin Zola’s yarn with all the “can you believe this?” immediacy of a good Twitter thread. (The regular tweet sound effects make it feel like the audience is following along to King’s original posts.) Much of Bravo’s humor comes from the larger-than-life characters, and the way the cast captures them — from Domingo’s cold-blooded thug to Brand’s dim bulb hick, and especially Keough’s trailer-trash inflections.

Holding it all together is Paige, who does more with a side-eye glance than most actors do with a sonnet. It’s through Paige’s Zola that we witness the increasingly strange antics, and she takes us through the fire and out with charm and wit. 

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‘Zola’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, June 30, in theaters. Rated R for strong sexual content and language throughout, graphic nudity, and violence including a sexual assault. Running time: 86 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 24, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Black Widow' delivers gritty action, and gives Scarlett Johansson a perfect swan song to her Marvel character

Scarlett Johansson finally gets a chance to be front-and-center in a Marvel movie in “Black Widow,” and she makes the most of the opportunity — bringing genuine emotion that adds some heft to the superhero spectacle.

“Black Widow” is the 23rd movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but don’t necessarily expect everything to go as you assume it will. This is also the first in the so-called “phase four” that follows the post-Tony Stark era, and the first to hit theaters in two years (thanks, COVID!). It’s also the third movie to have a female superhero in the title (after “Ant-Man and The Wasp” and “Captain Marvel”), the second to give that female superhero sole billing, and the first to have a solo female director — Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland (“Lore,” “Berlin Syndrome”) — in charge. 

Shortland and screenwriter Eric Pearson (“Thor: Ragnarok,” “Godzilla vs. Kong”) — with story credit to Jac Schaeffer (show-runner for “WandaVision”) and Ned Benson — are hemmed into a precise window in the life of Johansson’s character, super-spy and now Avenger Natasha Romanoff. That time is late 2016, right after the events of “Captain America: Civil War,” when the Avengers splintered and sent Natasha on the run — and shortly before what happened in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame,” of which Natasha didn’t survive to see the outcome.

First, though, a pre-credits flashback to 1995 Ohio, where sisters Natasha (Ever Anderson) and Yelena (Violet McGraw) live a happy suburban life with their parents, Melina (Rachel Weisz) and Alexei (David Harbour) — but, we soon learn, it’s all an elaborate cover for Melina and Alexei’s work as Russian spies, answering to the nasty Gen. Dreykov (Ray Winstone).

In 2016, Natasha is dodging Gen. Ross (William Hurt, in it for a minute) and the enforcers of the Sokovia Accords, hiding out in Norway. But something else is hunting her: A hyper-efficient armored assassin known as the Task Master. Natasha soon figures out the Task Master isn’t after her, but something in her SUV: A bundle of vials that contain a clue to who sent them — her “sister,” Yelena.

Yelena, played as an adult by Florence Pugh, is what Natasha used to be: A Black Widow, a super-assassin trained by Dreykov to kill on command. Unlike Natasha, who was trained through psychological conditioning, Yelena is controlled via chemicals — and the vials are a gas that breaks Dreykov’s control over the Widows. Yelena needs Natasha’s help to get to Dreykov, so she lures Natasha to the one place she doesn’t want to go: Budapest. (The city is referenced in the first “Avengers” movie and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and now we get to find out why.)

Eventually, we get a “family” reunion involving Natasha and Yelena finding their fake parents: Alexei, a super-soldier once called the Red Guardian (think Cap, but all in red), and Melina, who helped Dreykov create his most powerful weapons, an army of Widows.

Shortland adds a ground-level realism to the hand-to-hand battles, more street fight than kung-fu ballet. This lets us get up close with Johansson and Pugh, who both revel in adding a layer of expression to the choreographed combat. That grittiness extends to the CGI-aided finale, a battle through a sky of falling debris that feels like an attempt to outdo the finale of “Winter Soldier.”

The movie delivers some good humor in the byplay among Pugh, Weisz and Harbour, the fake family who’s more real that anyone is willing to admit. Best of all is Johanssen, who finally gets to show Natasha as more than a cat-suited sexpot or the Avengers’ dour event coordinator. If this is Johansson’s final bow as Black Widow — and it would take some serious retcon work to avoid that — she gets to go out on top, showing Natasha’s battered, resilient heart as she finally earns some redemption for her past sins.

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‘Black Widow’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 9, in theaters everywhere, and streaming (for a fee) on Disney+ Premier. Rated PG-13 for for intense sequences of violence/action, some language and thematic material. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'Werewolves Within' is a crafty satirical comedy wrapped in a horror movie's skins

The horror comedy “Werewolves Within” is a slow-burn movie whose satirical laughs and gory action both enter the picture slowly but build up toward a wickedly sharp ending.

Finn (Sam Richardson) is the newly arrived lawman in the small town of Beaverfield, Vermont. He’s not your stereotypical tough-guy law enforcer, though. As he’s driving into town, he’s listening to assertiveness-training tapes and leaving clingy voice mail messages to the girlfriend he’s not quite accepted has broken up with him.

Sam’s quirks allow him to fit right into Beaverfield, according to the first person he meets there: Cicely (Milana Vayntrub), the town’s perky letter carrier. Cicely introduces Sam to the odd cast of characters in town — who include Devon (Cheyenne Jackson), a tech millionaire from the city, and his yoga-instructor boyfriend, Joaquim (Harvey Guillén); trash-mouthed mechanic Gwen (Sarah Burns) and her stoner boyfriend, Marcus (George Basil); and craft-obsessed Trisha (Michaela Watkins) and her husband Pete (Michael Chernus), a walking sexual-harassment lawsuit; people-pleasing innkeeper Jeanine (Catherine Curtin); and anti-government mountain man Emerson Flint (Glenn Fleshler).

Finn arrives in the middle of a town dispute, involving the plans of developer Sam Parker (Wayne Duvall) to build a natural-gas pipeline through town. Some townsfolk like the idea, because it means they’ll get some money. Others prefer to listen to Dr. Ellis (Rebecca Henderson), a scientist and environmentalist who’s staying in Jeanine’s inn while she fights Sam’s proposal.

As if tensions aren’t running high already, Finn discovers that someone or something has ripped through metal to tear apart all the generators in town — and has killed and partially eaten Jeanine’s husband, Dave. Meanwhile, a storm has cut power lines and blocked the only road into town, so Finn must deal with a bunch of locals who are scared, suspicious and packing heat.

“Werewolves Within” is loosely based on a 2016 VR video game, where players must figure out which of them is a werewolf in disguise. It’s sort of a mix of the role-playing video game “Among Us” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

What director Josh Ruben (who also directed last year’s Sundance fright-filled comedy “Scare Me”) and first-time screenwriter Mishna Wolff (who’s known for her 2009 memoir “I’m Down”) bring to the proceedings is a dry sense of humor. It takes a little while to kick in, but there’s some sly commentary threaded through the jokes that touches on small-town paranoia, gun culture, environmental activism, #MeToo sexism and xenophobia — all lightly applied, never feeling preachy.

It helps that the ensemble cast is loaded with people — particularly Richardson (“Veep”), Curtin (“Stranger Things”) and Watkins (“Brittany Runs a Marathon”) — tuned into that satirical wavelength. The MVP is Vayntrub, known to most people as Lily, the AT&T store clerk, who channels that gal-next-door vibe into Cecily’s happily skewed take on Beaverfield’s oddballs. As the movie gets deeper into its who-can-you-trust? creepiness, Vayntrub’s comic skills come out to their fullest.

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‘Werewolves Within’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some bloody violence, sexual references and language throughout. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: In 'F9,' director Justin Lin continues the 'Fast and the Furious' franchise's mission of throwing everything at the screen.

It’s appropriate that the latest in the action-movie franchise that started with “The Fast & The Furious” is called “F9” — since that’s the key on the laptop that makes everything show up on your screen at once.

With director Justin Lin — who directed installments three through six — back at the helm, “F9” aims to tie up loose ends from the franchise’s past, while adding a few new ones, and providing a backstory to Dominic Toretto’s family that we didn’t know we wanted. Mostly, though, it follows the pattern of most of the series: A bunch of cars going fast and doing things that defy comprehension, belief and several laws of physics.

The movie doesn’t start where the eighth film, “The Fate of the Furious,” left off — not at first. Instead, Lin and his co-writer, Daniel Casey, kick off in 1989, with Jack Toretto (J.D. Pardo, from “Mayans M.C.”) competing in a stock car race, with his two sons, Dom (Vinnie Bennett) and Jakob (Finn Cole), leading his pit crew. Jack gets killed in a fiery crash on the track, a moment that has serious repercussions for the Toretto family decades later.

Cut to decades later, with Dom (Vin Diesel) living a quiet life off the grid with Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and his son, Little Brian (played by twins Isaac and Immanuel Holdane). That tranquility is broken when members of their old crew — driver Roman (Tyrese Gibson), tech genius Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) and hacker queen Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) — show up with an intercepted emergency signal from their old spymaster friend, Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell).

The details are unimportant, but it gets Dom and Letty back in the game — and soon our crew is in some Central American country (but really they filmed this part in Thailand) tracking down some high-tech doohickey from Mr. Nobody’s crashed plane. A chase scene commences, and a shadowy figure gets away with the doohickey.

That figure, Dom and Letty realize immediately, is Dom’s estranged brother, Jakob, played by John Cena. This revelation opens up more flashbacks, to show how Dom and Jakob grew apart after their father’s death — with Dom going to prison for the first time and later exiling Jakob from the family, both for reasons that won’t be spoiled here.

The next part of the story sends the crew members in different directions. Dom, Tej, Roman and Ramsey go to London to track Jakob, while Letty and Mia (Jordana Brewster), Dom’s sister, go to Tokyo on the scent of their friend Han (Sung Kang), who was killed in both the third and sixth films. The fact that these sequences are happening simultaneously, and both happening at night on opposite sides of the world, is something time-zone nitpickers will just have to accept.

It’s interesting that Lin, who got to kill off Han in both the third movie (“The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift”) and the sixth movie (“Fast & Furious 6”), is now given the chance to undo that cinematic death. If you’ve seen the trailers, you already know that Han is back from the dead — because this is a franchise that keeps a major character alive even after the actor who plays him dies. (Paul Walker may be gone, but Dom’s BFF Brian remains eternal.) 

Oh, Tej and Roman also come across Sean (Lucas Black), Twinkie (Shad Moss, the artist formerly known as Lil Bow Wow) and Earl (Jason Tobin) — three of the lead characters from “Tokyo Drift.” They’re in Germany playing with cars and rocket engines. Can’t imagine that this tidbit will become important later in the movie.

After a few minutes, and a gratuitous Helen Mirren walk-on, we learn that Jakob is enlisting the aid of the last movie’s supervillain, Cipher (Charlize Theron), and being bankrolled by Otto (Danish actor Thue Ersted Rasmussen), the Eurotrash son of some dictator. Among the things Otto’s Amex card is paying for is a very powerful electromagnet — which provides the rationale for some of the more outlandish stunts in the movie’s second half.

Lin sticks to the official reason for this franchise’s existence —the strength of family, whether it’s the still-tight bond between Dom and Jakob or the haphazard family of Dom’s crew, whom we have grown to love throughout the franchise. Between Dom’s dealings with Jakob, both in the present day and flashbacks, Lin leans in heavy to the melodrama. (He also manages to cast the younger Torettos with actors, Bennett and Cole, who look remarkably like computer-generated de-aged versions of Diesel and Cena.)

But Lin also plays true to the real reason this franchise has lasted for 20 years: Making cars go fast and everything around them go boom, whether it all makes sense or not. Lin throws everything up on the screen, gleefully overloading on action, stunts and special effects — in other words, the things that make us want to see movies in big theaters, rather than home on our TV screens.

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‘F9’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and language. Running time: 145 minutes.

Review: 'The Sparks Brothers' showcases the pioneering pop band over 50 years of clips and interviews with some famous fans

It’s possible that no brothers have been so musically talented and consistently cool for 50-plus years, without the mainstream success that usually comes with such longevity, as Ron and Russell Mael, the duo that make up the band Sparks.

The Maels sit down for the definitive career-spanning documentary in “The Sparks Brothers,” in which director Edgar Wright (“Shaun of the Dead,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) makes a strong case for why Sparks is the band that other musicians always talk about.

Growing up in the Los Angeles area — and not the UK, which many people assume — the Maels grew up on early rock ’n’ roll, from Bill Haley and the Comets on to Elvis, Little Richard and James Brown. They also grew up on Saturday matinees, cartoons and newsreels, back when you came in during the middle of the movie and stayed until it looped around again. Ron Mael says this may explain their jagged narrative style.

After their father died when Ron was 11 and Russ was 8, the brothers relied on each other to guard against the cruel world. Ron took piano lessons, and Russ became a jock — and they both thrived on the pop music of Los Angeles AM radio of the ‘60s. Mom even drove them to Vegas in their teens to see The Beatles.

After forming a few bands in college, they started Sparks in 1967, with Russell as the handsome frontman (he modeled himself after Mick Jagger and Roger Daltrey, maybe with Marc Bolan of T. Rex thrown in) and Ron as the mad scientist at the keyboard. Most record-company scouts didn’t get what Sparks was doing, but the band’s manager got a demo tape to rocker Todd Rundgren, who urged his label to sign them immediately. Rundgren talks about his love of the band, and bears no grudge that his girlfriend at the time went on to date Russell Mael.

For a time, Ron sported a mustache that was somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler. Wright shows, through animation, a possibly apocryphal moment when Sparks appeared on the BBC’s “Top of the Pops,” and John Lennon rang up Ringo Starr and said, “There’s Marc Bolan playing with Hitler.” (Wright enlisted his mates, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, to perform the voices of John and Ringo.)

Wright devotes time to nearly all of Sparks’ 25 albums over the last half-century, so there are moments when the audience feels it’s being held captive by an overly obsessive Sparks completist — which we are, kind of. But Wright has lots of company, based on the many interviews with famous musicians who note the debt to owe to Sparks. Vince Clarke of Erasure jokes that he, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran (who’s in the movie) and Chris Lowe of Pet Shop boys all copy Ron Mael’s morose stance behind the keyboards. Meanwhile, The Go-Go’s Jane Wiedlin (who dueted with Russell Mael on Sparks’ 1983 hit “Cool Places”) and Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand (who formed a supergroup with Sparks, called FFS, in 2015) both marvel at the fun of collaborating with their favorite band.

There’s plenty of footage of Sparks in performance; they appeared often on “American Bandstand” and many similar shows in Europe — and they went through an MTV phase, as everyone did in the ‘80s.

Wright’s thesis is that Sparks was ahead of every pop trend from the ‘70s through the ‘90s — from synthesizers to dance moves later appropriated by Molly Ringwald — but never stayed in one lane long enough to reap the financial rewards of their pioneering music. But when you see Ron and Russell Mael now, still making music their own way in their 70s, it’s hard to say they weren’t successful. 

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‘The Sparks Brothers’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, June 18, at Century 16 (South Salt Lake), Cinemark 24 Jordan Landing (West Valley City), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi), and Cinemark 16 (Provo). Rated R for language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: Documentary gives Rita Moreno, EGOT-winning icon and Hollywood survivor, the profile she's always deserved

A filmmaker would have to go out of their way to botch a documentary about someone as lively, and with as long and as storied a career, as Rita Moreno.

Thankfully, director Mariem Pérez Riera does a beautiful job of profiling the 89-year-old Hollywood legend and survivor, mostly by letting Moreno herself do the majority of the talking.

Moreno is game to talk about a lot of her life: Her childhood in Puerto Rico during the Depression, moving with her mother to New York when she was 5, becoming a performer, dressing up like Elizabeth Taylor to impress Louis B. Mayer and get her first studio contract. And that’s just the beginning.

Moreno talks candidly about being typecast in “native girl” roles, wearing “makeup the color of mud” to play Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and, in “The King and I,” a Thai maiden. She also talks about the leering, harassment and abuse at the hands of the men who ran Hollywood, including being raped by her own agent.

Through all the bad material, there were some gems: Roles in ‘Singin’ in the Rain” (as the flashy flapper Zelda) and her Oscar-winning performance in Anita in “West Side Story.” Pérez Riera interviews scholars and many famous names — including Eva Longoria, Gloria Estefan and Lin-Manuel Miranda — to dissect the cultural significance of Anita, and Moreno’s surprise Oscar win for the role. 

Moreno also talks candidly about her tempestuous relationship with Marlon Brando, and several tragedies that accompanied it. And she talks about how, after her Oscar win, she turned down the “native girl” roles and ended up not making another movie for seven years. Instead, she went to Broadway, winning a Tony for Terrence McNally’s “The Ritz.” She also worked on the children’s TV series “The Electric Company” (the album for which got her a Grammy), and a classic appearance on “The Muppet Show,” for which she won her first Emmy — completing her EGOT trophy case.

Moreno has never stopped working, though it seems like every 20 years, she lands a “comeback” role — as a nun counseling inmates on “Oz” in the ‘90s, and most recently as the flamboyant grandma on the reboot of “One Day at a Time.” 

(Update: It speaks to Moreno’s longevity, and her importance as a trailblazer, that she can still court controversy — as she did this week when she appeared on “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and defended Miranda over complaints that the movie of his musical “in the Heights” didn’t show enough representation of the Afro-Latinx community. Moreno followed up the next day by tweeting that “I’m incredibly disappointed with myself” for being “clearly dismissive of Black lives that matter in our Latin community.” Moreno then praised Miranda’s “sensitivity and resolve to be more inclusive of the Afro-Latino community going forward,” and added, “see, you CAN teach this old dog new tricks.”)

Pérez Riera (whose son played the teen grandson on “One Day at a Time”) assembles a raft of movie clips and archival footage, as well as interviews with friends, colleagues and historians who put the work into context. But the strength of the film is Moreno herself, who in her 80s is still the attention seeker and truth teller she says she’s been since she was a little girl.

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‘Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 18, at Century 16 (South Salt Lake) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, some strong language including a sexual reference, and suggestive material. Running time: 90 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 31, 2021, when the film premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

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.