118 min | PG-13 | June 11, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
A washed-out football coach arrives at a Fort Worth orphanage during the Depression and builds a team out of boys who have nothing. They have no shoes, no playbook, and twelve players total. The true story is stirring. The movie wrings it dry.
Rusty Russell takes a teaching job at the Masonic Home in Fort Worth in 1938. The orphanage has no football program, no equipment, and a roster of underfed boys nobody expects to win anything. Russell turns them into a powerhouse that contends for the state title. The film treats this true story as a delivery system for inspiration. Every obstacle exists to be overcome on schedule, and every setback arrives precisely when the structure demands one.
Luke Wilson plays Russell with a steady, weary decency that anchors the film. He underplays where the script wants him to swell, and that restraint is the most honest thing on screen. Martin Sheen plays Doc Hall, the alcoholic team physician who narrates, and Sheen gives the role a rumpled warmth the writing does not earn. Wayne Knight plays the cruel administrator Frank Wynn as a one-note villain who exists to be hated. Robert Duvall appears briefly as booster Mason Hawk and coasts on presence. The boys, led by Jake Austin Walker as the volatile Hardy Brown, register as types rather than people.
Ty Roberts directs from a script he wrote with Lane Garrison and Kevin Meyer. The film bathes every frame in a sepia haze and amber light that announces “Depression-era prestige” before a word is spoken. The football sequences cut so fast and so frequently that the geography of any given play dissolves into impressionistic motion and slow-motion grimaces. The score swells under every speech to instruct the audience exactly when to feel moved. Roberts never trusts a moment to land on its own.
The film hits every beat the genre has trained you to expect. The hard-luck team, the doubting opponents, the climactic game, the redemptive father figure. There is a genuine story here about men who gave orphaned boys a reason to stand up straight. The movie buries that story under varnish and uplift until it stops feeling like anything happened to real people. It is a competent assembly of parts that flatters its audience instead of moving it.