Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

12 Mighty Orphans Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson April 18, 2022

Ty Roberts's third feature is based on Jim Dent's 2007 non-fiction book, Twelve Mighty Orphans: The Inspiring True Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football. The movie was expected to launch in theaters all across Texas at the start of football season in 2020 but when the pandemic hit, this forced Sony to postpone its theatrical release until the following summer. Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson) and his wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw) have driven to Fort Worth where Rusty has accepted a new teaching position at the Masonic Home and School of Texas. This is an abode to 150 students who've become orphans. Rusty can certainly relate since he was once an orphan. He recently left a football coaching job in Temple, Texas but Masonic doesn't even have a football team, much less a practice field. Rusty teaches math while his wife instructs mostly girls in English class. The twelve orphans who become pupils of Rusty's try out for football and all they have to practice with is a makeshift ball with stuffed flour. The school lacks the funds to provide jerseys, cleats (the teens initially have to practice barefoot), and the necessary equipment. Nonetheless, Rusty helps keep them drilled with plenty of exercises. Doc Hall (Martin Sheen), the school's physician, volunteers to be Rusty's assistant coach and eventually his de facto defensive coordinator.

But first they need help gaining approval to enter University Interscholastic League’s 1A division. Manon Hawk (Robert Duvall) is one of the school's benefactors who helps get the Mighty Mites on the field. Their opponents are usually thirty to five pounds bigger and when the season opens, the Mighty Mites get crushed. But while Rusty is diagramming a play, his young daughter Betty notices and she draws one of her own that resembles the Wing-T formation. Surprised and intrigued by Betty's "drawing," Rusty gets inspiration to implement the spread offense. The Mighty Mites can't play power football to win so they need to get their player out in the open field. The new offense works like a charm as the team rattles win after win. Standing in their way is bullish and unethical Luther Scarborough (Lane Garrison, one of the film's three screenwriters), the head football coach at Polytechnic High School. Luther's team plays dirty and he'll use any unsavory tactic to win. The other villain is Frank Wynn (Wayne Knight), the Masonic Home and School's co-administrator. Frank believes in corporal punishment by the paddle and exploits the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 by incorporating Masonic's students as slave laborers to work on his for-profit print shop. Frank would rather see the football team fail and fold.

Assembling the team.

Martin Sheen has served as narrator for at least three other features and does again in 12 Mighty Orphans. He does a fine job of setting up the story events. Sheen is actually listed in the credits behind Robert Duvall but the latter really only appears in one scene. Sheen is more like Luke Wilson's co-star as he's in a majority of the movie. Structurally, Ty Roberts makes a mistake by showing part of a scene at the very beginning that the audience will see in its entirety late in the picture. This cuts off any suspense that a hanging subplot tries to build before the third act.

The audience learns a lot about Rusty Russell but very little about his spouse. The film only spends time developing some of the twelve mighty orphans. Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker) arrives in the first act with his clothes all bloodied. His father was fatally wounded with a shotgun blast. Hardy holds his old man against him as he dies. Hardy has a lot of pent-up rage that he unleashes to great impact on the football field. Wheatie (Slade Monroe) is a likeable lad who's visited by his mother, Wanda Sealy (Lucy Faust), ten years after she dropped him off at the home. Wanda has what appears like an abusive boyfriend and despite her prodding for her son to go back with them, Wheatie feels right at home with his surrogate family. Fairbanks (Levi Dylan) is one of the most popular guys and dating a girl from English class. But beyond them and Snoggs (Jacob Lofland), Roberts doesn't devote much coverage to the other orphans, including two Hispanics. 12 Mighty Orphans isn't one of the most original football movies. It invokes a lot of sports clichés but it avoids others to deliver a pretty satisfying underdog story.

12 Mighty Orphans Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sony Pictures Classics has released 12 Mighty Orphans on an MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50 (disc size: 38.77 GB) that comes with a slipcover. The picture appears in its original exhibition ratio of 2.39:1. The film is set during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years so the image palette looks appropriately desaturated with sepia tones. Grassland appears arid. Roberts and his editor James K. Crouch intercut footage of Rusty and his fellow troops in the bunker during World War I, which is in black and white (see Screenshot #20). The transfer often looks soft but doesn't sport any source flaws. Sony has encoded the feature at a mean video bitrate of 27793 kbps.

Sixteen chapters accompany the 118-minute movie.

12 Mighty Orphans Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sony has supplied an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround (2202 kbps, 16-bit). Dialogue is consistently clear and crisp. I often could detect distinct separation between the front channels and the surrounds. The f/x frequently derives from football-related action. Composer Mark Orton's score often employs sliding guitar, fiddle, and banjo. My favorite parts are his melodies accented by lovely strings and piano. For one cue, he uses counterpoint to great effect.

Sony has included a plethora of subtitling options.

12 Mighty Orphans Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (14:09, 1080p) - a collection of excised scenes presented in 2.39:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo. Several of these are short. Others are comprised of extended scenes and alternate takes. There's a subplot involving Rusty and his mother that goes further than what's in the final cut. It would have been nice if those additional scenes remained in the film. Sony provides optional English SDH as well as additional subtitles in English, Mandarin, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai.

• Bonus Previews - several trailers for other Sony Pictures Classics titles.

12 Mighty Orphans Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

12 Mighty Orphans is no Rudy (1993) or Remember the Titans (2000) but it provides a snapshot into the pigskin when the game was played like rugby. This isn't a story that's all that well-known so kudos to Jim Dent for writing about it and to Ty Roberts for bringing it to the silver screen. The movie it most reminds me of is Glory Road (2005), which is about another Texas underdog sports team that shot to national prominence. If you enjoyed watching coach Don Haskins and his Texas Western basketball team, you're sure to embrace coach Rusty Russell and his dozen overachievers. Sony has given us a very solid transfer that reflects the period of the 1930s quite well. The only extra is a slew of deleted scenes. A HEARTY RECOMMENDATION for 12 Mighty Orphans.