Mark Reviews Movies: 12 MIGHTY ORPHANS

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | June 17, 2021

12 Mighty Orphans isn't just about football, although director Ty Roberts' film is convincing and somewhat unique when it is about the sport. This is instead a story about old, current, and persistent wounds, as well as one about people coming together in recognition of sharing that pain.

The story is based on a true one, as documented in Jim Dent's non-fiction book, about a high school football team that rallied a country in the grips of the Great Depression. The team was made up of orphans, of course, left behind by parents or a parent who couldn't afford children, needed to find work, or simply didn't want them.

Their pain is unmistakable, and their reactions to feeling abandoned by the people whom they believed were supposed to love them the most is completely understandable. These teens are angry, quiet, insecure, cynical, or all of these things at once—or varying ones under different circumstances. No one believes in them, and in turn, they don't much believe in anything, especially themselves.

Obviously, they don't make movies about such pain unless there's a clear flip side to it, and in this case, screenwriters Roberts, Lane Garrison, and Kevin Meyer see the story of these orphans as a means of pretty clear-cut inspiration. The students, living and learning and working in an orphanage in the area of modern-day Fort Worth, Texas, find unity and overcome their physical limitations to become a surprisingly effective football team.

They lose, but they learn from those losses. They win, but those victories on the field don't quite fill the holes in their lives and hearts. The entire country, including the President, finds inspiration in the team's success, but it's the local camaraderie and their coach's belief in them that gives each of the players a reason for hope.

Football matters to this story, in other words, but the sport isn't not the key point of it. Indeed, because the game—as a matter of strategy and records and Big Games—isn't the most important element of this tale, we actually have a reason to care about all of the usually clichéd aspects of this story. It matters to these characters, and since they matter to us, the game matters, too.

The impetus for the Masonic Home's creation of a football team comes from a new arrival to the orphanage. He's Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson), a teacher and high school-level football coach, who has packed up his family—wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw), a fellow teacher, and their young daughter Betty (Lillie Fink)—to live, teach, and coach at the orphanage. The home's doctor "Doc" Hall (Martin Sheen) knows of Rusty's previous success as a football coach and believes the game could benefit the orphans.

In terms of a plot, all of this is pretty straightforward and predictable. If Sheen's own comforting voice-over narration of events is any indication, Roberts is fully aware of this fact and embraces it, so that the underlying elements of this story can have a greater focus.

The new team, made up of underfed and overworked kids who have never played the game or even held a football, has some trouble picking up and adapting to the sport. They practice. They get into skirmishes while scrimmaging. After convincing the Texas intramural board and fellow coaches to let the orphanage into the league (The bureaucracy, inevitably, becomes another of a few obstacles the team has to confront during the third act), the team's first game is a disaster. All looks lost.

Thanks to a random drawing his daughter draws, Rusty comes up with a new kind of offense—one that would become the standard for football for the rest of its history and even now (a little piece of trivia that's fascinating in an isolated way). Spreading the players out and allowing the quarterback have multiple options, the Mighty Mites, as the team dubs itself, start winning without looking back.

All of this material is pretty standard fare, although the sheer brutality of the contemporary form of the sport (more akin to rugby, the way it was played at the time) and the physical vulnerability of the players (Some of the injuries here—a compound fracture and someone's nose being pushed back into place—are fairly gruesome) definitely add to the stakes of the football sections. Mostly, though, the story spends time with Rusty, who's an orphan himself and a traumatized veteran of the Great War, and Doc, a widower with a good heart (even refusing pay for his work) and a dependence on alcohol, and a selection of some of the players, such as the heated Hardy (Jake Austin Walker) and Wheatie (Slade Monroe), whose mother suddenly arrives expecting the years of absence to mean nothing.

Some of this material feels extraneous—mainly, the villainous and abusive workshop manager (played by Wayne Knight) who wants to sabotage the team—or a bit too forced in creating historical importance—namely, an interlude and intervention featuring President Franklin Roosevelt (Larry Pine). Most of it, though, is simple, to-the-point, and compassionate about these characters, their respective experiences, and, above all, their growing understanding that the only way to get through the pain of their circumstances is together.

If that sounds a bit sappy, 12 Mighty Orphans admittedly is. There is, though, a real sincerity to the storytelling here—a homegrown fable of sorts (David McFarland's lovingly stark cinematography goes a long way in creating nostalgia), with an easy but moving lesson about having faith in others and oneself.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)

Buy the Book

Buy the Book (Kindle Edition)