Review: "12 Mighty Orphans"

 

"12 Mighty Orphans" is an old-school sports movie based on a true(y) story that plays its cards straight down the line -- too straight, if you ask me.

Back in 1938 a Texas orphanage formed a football team with just a dozen boys, giving hope to the Depression masses as they turned people's heads, fought their way to the state championship game and changed the way the sport was played forever. 

It's inspiring stuff with rousing action, technically well-made and sure to draw a tear or two from the audience. It shares a lot of the DNA of "Hoosiers," as castoff hicks are dismissed by the titans of the sport, a troubled coach is brought in from outside the community and, after butting heads with some of the local powers-that-be, forges the players into a tribe of warriors.

There's even a drunkard assistant coach a la Dennis Hopper, played here by Martin Sheen, who also serves as narrator.

Director Ty Roberts ("The Iron Orchard") co-wrote the screenplay with Lane Garrison and Kevin Meyer based on the book by sports author Jim Dent. Together they've built a movie that is completely impervious to irony and subtlety. All the Texans say what they mean and mean what they say, and each of the boys falls into a pretty predictable "type," as do the supporting adult characters.

The actors deliver the dialogue with all the heartfelt conviction they can muster, particularly Luke Wilson as head coach Rusty Russell. But it often registers as hammy and stilted, one cornpone bit of soothsaying merging into the next.

This movie plays earnest as all hell, but scores no points of originality.

It takes place at the Fort Worth Masonic Home, which in the 1930s housed about 150 boys and girls ranging from tykes to near-grownups. Some were orphans whose parents were dead, but many were simply abandoned by folks who couldn't afford to feed them in the wake of the Dust Bowl.

Russell, who was nearly blinded in the Great War and later had success with other sports teams, is recruited as a teacher and to build a football program from scratch. His wife, Juanita (Vinessa Shaw), is brought in as English teacher and to do supportive wifey things while staying firmly relegated to the background.

Things follow a pretty standard route. First they have to overcome the lack of a field or equipment, then get the students academically eligible to play, and finally convince the Texas football A-league to admit them as a team. After all that plays out, they're left with just the titular dozen players, none who have football experience or are big enough for traditional toughman play.

Sheen plays Doc, the over-the-hill doctor and good soul who's looked upon as a father figure by most of the orphans, who tends to split lips and strained knees, in between constantly nipping at his breast pocket whiskey.

It's tough to create 12 distinctive characters for each of the kids, so three or four get star billing and the rest sort of fade into a Greek chorus -- including the two Latino students, which seems a very un-woke choice these days. 

There's Snoggs (Jacob Lofland), the scrawny but scrappy kid who really has no business on a gridiron; dashing Fairbanks (Levi Dylan), nicknamed after the movie star, constantly chased by girls off the field and by opposing players on it; and Wheatie (Slade Monroe), the gritty natural leader who becomes quarterback by default.

The spotlight falls mostly on Hardy Brown, played by Jake Austin Walker, who's not that big but hits like a sledgehammer. Brought to the orphanage in the opening act after witnessing his father murdered -- Hardy's overalls still sticky with his blood -- he is the sullen troublemaker who gets into fights with the other orphans, joins the team under protest and, of course, will become the most fervent team-firster by the end.

(A note on historical accuracy: the real Hardy Brown did indeed go on to a 12-year NFL career as a feared tackler, though he was too young to play on the 1938 orphans team and his father's death occurred when he was little. By Hollywood norms, these are fairly standard deviations from recorded reality.) 

A couple of rival newspaper men, including one played by Treat Williams, help get the word out about the Mighty Mites aka orphan team, at one point even enlisting the help of FDR himself to help overcome some cattywampus sports bureaucracy. Robert Duvall turns up in a too-short cameo as a school booster.

There are two main villains. Wayne Knight plays Frank Wynn, who runs the "day-to-day" at the school, meaning he has sign-making class that is basically a child-labor operation, and he carries a big wooden paddle that he swings freely with the boys in the name of discipline, but enjoys a tad too much. Screenwriter/actor Garrison plays Luther, head of the rival Polytechnic school team, a football snob who's constantly rubbing Russell's face in his lack of resources or talent, though the bait is amiably refused.

As screen heavies go, there's the top, there's over the top and then there's over the top of the top, which is where these guys fly. Luther wears a Hitler haircut and sports John Lennon sunglasses, a little twerp braggart sucking on phallic stogies, and seems like a time-traveling alien who picked up bad habits from every era.

Frank has the mustache to go with Luther's hair, though if his mustachios were a bit longer I think he might start twirling them. He's always sweaty and stooped, a foot shorter than the orphans he terrorizes, and we're just waiting around for his uppance to come. 

I don't want to pick on Knight, who's had a lovely career, but he's transparently doing a (more) evil version of his Newman character from "Seinfeld," and even whips out the tittering laugh. This is a situation where you look to director Roberts to step in to protect his actor and his movie against bad choices, and he didn't.

The football action, and there's quite a lot of it, is staged very well with plenty of kinetic mayhem. This is back in the day before face guards or body padding, and the players are basically hurling themselves into a brick wall on each down. I also liked the portrayal of Russell's innovation of what became known as the spread or motion offense, using the whole field and putting more emphasis on speed and skill than just sheer size.

"12 Mighty Orphans" is far from a bad movie. My guess is most sports film fans will cheer for it more than I did. To me, it's the storytelling equivalent of the anachronistic way of playing ball the orphans overcame: line it up, plow straight ahead and hope for glory.

Review: "The Devil Has a Name"

A real head-scratcher, though a fitfully enjoyable one, "The Devil Has a Name" is part Western revenge thriller, part corporate intrigue, part courtroom drama and a little bit exploration of the psychotic mind. 

Imagine if Anton Chigurh from "No Country for Old Men" went head-to-head with Daniel Plainview from "There Will Be Blood" in a dispute over oil drilling pollution, and the whole thing wound up in court where Marlene Dietrich was the key figure a la "Witness for the Prosecution," with a bombastic attorney and sniveling media figure tossed in for good measure.

The basic story is an older, small-time California farmer getting muscled by a huge energy company called Shore Oil that has been poisoning the area groundwater for a decade. After he refuses to sell, they bring in their intimidator to try to knock him down, and instead he enlists a crusading lawyer to sue the company for billions.

This screenplay by Robert McEveety is a classic example of too many ingredients in the gumbo. The fact that a lot of them are quite tasty, especially the performances by an eclectic cast of name actors, doesn't mitigate the fact there's just too damn much going on.

I was never bored by "Devil," and enjoyed seeing actors I admire like David Strathairn and Edward James Olmos get meaty parts. But the film -- which Olmos also directed -- feels at once too big and too small for the story it's trying to tell. We get lots of swell little moments but they come and go quickly without a lot of build-up or weight.

This project seems like it would have lived and breathed better as a six- or eight-episode limited series on a streaming service, maybe something juicier and deliberately funnier with a tabloid feel.

Strathairn is the central figure as Fred Stern, who owns a small orchard. He and his wife always dreamed of sailing away together, but she died the previous year and Fred's not much use to anybody these days, letting his foreman and steady friend, Santiago (Olmos), run the show. 

Just as some of his trees start to show evidence of polluted water from the nearby dumping ponds, which Shore Oil doesn't even bother to line with protective material, Fred is approached with a strange offer. Alex Gardner (Haley Joel Osment), who worked for him as a kid and now is a small-town TV personality, offers fifty grand for the property. 

Reading between the lines, Fred figures he can get more by holding out.

Then into the picture enters Ezekiel, played by Pablo Schreiber in a big, loud, energetic performance that feels like it belongs to entirely another movie. He's the enforcer sent by the Big Boss in Houston to ensure things go smoothly,  but it soon becomes clear he's a completely unhinged, power-hungry type playing to his own off-chord tune -- and is unafraid to resort to violence if it suits him.

His back now up, Fred turns to Ralph Wegis (Martin Sheen), an over-the-hill but still feisty lawyer famous for having once taken Ford down over the Pinto. Ralph found out Ford knew the Pinto had a fatal problem that would take $11 to fix, but calculated it was cheaper to pay lawyers to fight wrongful death claims than save lives, and he figures that's what's going on now with Shore.

Standing at the center of the tale but somehow almost entirely unnecessary to it is Gigi Cutler, who has a family stake in Shore and has been sent to watch over things. Gigi doesn't seem to do much but wear furs and smoke cigarettes and gargle booze while giving everyone a femme fatale stare from hell, but Kate Bosworth is obviously having a hell of a time doing it.

A framing story has Gigi giving her account to the Big Boss (Alfred Molina) on how things went south, with her about to lose her stake in Shore as a result. Her character has terrific verve but no real interior as written. We're just supposed to admire the puzzle and not bother putting anything together.

Sheen is always reliable in this sort of role as a man who likes the sound of his own voice, and Strathairn gets to show a few empathetic notes as an old-timer who's been eating regret for so long he surprises himself by learning he's eager for a fight.

I also liked Osment, who's struggled to find good roles after a fantastic stretch as a kid actor, playing a fellow who's a natural bootlicker type, a guy who can't lose his moral compass because he was never issued the equipment in the first place. Please keep casting him, Hollywood.

I was half expecting Ezekiel to go full Buffalo Bill from "The Silence of the Lambs," or Gigi to hook up with the lawyer or the journalist or anybody, really. I've been trying to figure out what this movie is, with all its disparate, ill-fitting pieces. I think I've realized it's a dusty soap opera set in the California desert, where anything can happen and just might, even if it doesn't make a lick of sense.

Reeling Backward: "The Final Countdown (1980)

When pornographic films first went mainstream in the 1970s, the smut studios discovered it was actually very hard to fill up a feature-length movie run time with just depictions of sex. No matter how repetitive the various thrustings and couplings became, there just wasn't sufficient racy footage to get up to a respectable 80- or 85-minute length.

So they started to cheat by showing a bunch of "filler" -- stuff that a normal narrative film skips over. Things like cars pulling up to a house, the door opening, people walking inside, unnecessary conversations, etc. It made them seem more like, as famously described in "Boogie Nights," a "real movie."

Why do I bring up porno flicks in relation to 1980's sci-fi/action film, "The Final Countdown"? Because even though there's no sex -- indeed, there's only one female in an entire movie crammed with Navy dudes, and she doesn't do more than trade moony looks with an officer -- this low-budget spectacle is positively filled with filler.

Peter Douglas, son of Kirk, had a script but not much of a budget, so he turned to the U.S. Navy for help. They saw the project as a clever recruiting tool, and provided the complete use of the aircraft U.S.S. Nimitz, its aircraft and much of its crew for several weeks of shooting.

A few name actors carry the story -- besides Kirk Douglas there's Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, Charles Durning and James Farentino -- but an astonishingly large portion of the 103-minute runtime is made up of Navy personnel running hither and fro, loading weapons and moving ordnance, planes taking off and landing, and so forth.

The film, a modest hit at the time, has developed a cult status among military aficionados for its realistic depiction of operations aboard a modern aircraft carrier. Of course it's accurate -- director Don Taylor largely just filmed what was happening aboard the ship, and worked in a preposterous sci-fi plot in between the everyday doings.

And that story is a doozy: the Nimitz encounters a random time wormhole that takes it back to Dec. 6, 1941 -- the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Douglas, as the captain, must decide whether to intervene and prevent the massacre, or let history take its course. In the end he's a by-the-book man, and decides it's his duty to defend his country no matter when and where.

The entire movie is a big tease. No battle actually ever takes place between modern American jets and vintage Japanese Zeroes, as the never-explained wormhole opens up again just in time to suck the Nimitz and its planes back to 1980.

Returning to the porno reference, "The Final Countdown" is all foreplay and no main event, making its head-scratching title even scratchier.

There is one sorta-encounter between a pair of F-14 Tomcats and some Zero replicas (left over from "Tora! Tora! Tora!" supposedly). It's the one moderately entertaining segment of the movie, though we never really get the sense of a tense aerial dogfight. Even more ridiculously, one of the Japanese pilots (Soon-Tek Oh) somehow survives his crash, is taken prisoner and gets loose, managing to kill four or five Navymen.

Sheen plays Lasky, a Defense Department civilian observer placed aboard the Nimitz for reasons that are mysterious even to him. Farentino is the wing commander who just happens to be a Pearl Harbor history buff. Charles Durning plays a (fictitious) U.S. senator who was killed by Japanese fighters as part of the historical event, but who gets inadvertently saved by the time travelers. Ross is his smart and winsome right-hand woman, who falls for the Farentino character.

The film ends with one of those out-of-left-field twists that is supposed to make the audience drop their jaws, but which only raises more puzzling time-loop questions that aren't really all that interesting, anyway.

Even as downmarket entertainment, "The Final Countdown" feels cheap and lazy. The actors appear to be going through the motions -- Kirk Douglas does a winking turn that suggests he had a good laugh at how goofy the movie was during production. If you took out all the endless loops of Navy-action, the film would get chopped down from 103 minutes to about 20. I think I would've found that version more watchable.

Video review: "The Amazing Spider-Man"

For an absolutely unnecessary reboot of the web-slinging superhero franchise, "The Amazing Spider-Man" is terrifically well-done. It attacks the character of Pete Parker, a nerdy kid who gets bitten by a radioactive arachnid, from a darker perspective than the previous trilogy.

Andrew Garfield, taking over the lead role from Tobey Maguire, draws a portrait of a socially ostracized kid who was probably headed to a lonely life of despair if he hadn't been turned into a non-caped crusader.

Becoming Spider-Man teaches him harsh lessons about responsibility -- particularly after his believed Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) is slain because of his inaction -- but it also helps him come out of his shell, especially with regard to lady love Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone).

The heavy here is Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), a scientist who becomes Peter's mentor as they try to unlock the secret of transferring the regenerative power of reptiles to humans. It does help Connors regrow his missing arm -- but also turns him into the fearsome, toothsome Lizard.

Director Marc Webb was an unlikely choice for a big-budget action film, his only other credit being the indie romance, "(500) Days of Summer." But Webb and the trio of screenwriters have made something genuinely new out of something old.

Please note, "The Amazing Spider-Man" will be released on video Friday, Nov. 9.

The film comes with a heaping helping if extras, even with the base DVD version. It boasts a feature-length commentary track by the filmmakers, deleted scenes, product art gallery and footage from stunt rehearsals.

Upgrade to the Blu-ray/DVD combo, and you add more than 90 minutes of behind-the-scenes documentaries, focusing on casting, story development, costumes, locations and special effects. There's also a Second Screen App for mobile devices with storyboards, interviews and more.

Opt for the 3-D Blu-ray combo and you add some featurettes on 3D imaging processes.

Go all in for the 4-disc Limited Edition Gift Set and you also get special packaging and collectible figurines of Spider-Man and the Lizard.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars

Review: "The Amazing Spider-Man"

Let's just get this out of the way: no, there was absolutely no need for this reboot of the Spider-Man movie franchise. The first film came out just a decade ago, and the last one was a mere five years ago -- and was underwhelming at that.

From what I understand, "The Amazing Spider-Man" had to be made or the rights to the iconic comic book hero would've lapsed. As motivations go for spending a reported $220 million on a movie -- or even $220 -- it's a pathetically shabby one.

But that's the studio honchos. The filmmakers and cast, however, have attacked the material with pure hearts and dedication, and come up with a genuinely terrific super-hero movie.

(Of course, the studio bosses are the ones who hired the movie-makers, so let's give them that credit.)

The most obvious question people will have about this new version of Spider-Man is how it differs from the previous trilogy, starring Tobey Maguire and directed by Sam Raimi. Without giving too much away, the answer is: quite a bit.

This Spidey is more of a throwback to themes of the original comic books, in which young high school student Peter Parker is a socially outcast science whiz who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and finds he can climb walls, lift cars and sense impending danger. He's lost and shut off, especially after his wise father figure, Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen), is killed by a robber Peter could have caught but chose not to.

Andrew Garfield's Peter is much more alienated than Maguire's relatively smooth and serene take. Garfield stammers, won't look others in the eyes and hunches his shoulders like he's trying to collapse into his torso.

His lady love isn't Mary Jane Parker, but Gwen Stacy, who's just as smart as him and is played by Emma Stone, one of the best actresses of her young generation. It's a bit of a mystery why a brainy, popular girl like her would fall for the nerdy Peter, but Stone offers little grace notes that help us feel the connection.

Director Marc Webb's only other feature film was the wonderful "(500) Days of Summer," which had approximately 1/30th the budget of this movie. It was a bold choice to pick him to helm a mega-budget production like this, but one that has paid lovely dividends.

Webb chooses to go light on the CGI to depict Spider-Man's web-slinging -- at least initially. For awhile, he's more akin to one of those parkour guys, bouncing around walls like an Olympic-grade gymnast. Webb lets us to see Peter slowly grow into his powers.

Another interesting change is the use of Spidey's webs. In the previous films, the web-slinger utilized them almost exclusively for locomotion, whereas here it's an integral part of his fighting style. Also notable is that they're not an organic part of his package of spider powers -- as many have pointed out, if it was then the webbing would come out of his butt instead of his wrists. Instead, it's a bit of technology that Peter "liberates" from a huge corporation and adapts for his own use.

That company is Oscorp, known from the other movies as the brainchild of Norman Osborn, aka Green Goblin, who is absent here. Instead, Oscorp's top scientist plays the heavy. Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) is a leading herpetologist looking to perform cross-species DNA splicing.

He has a very personal motivation: Connors wants to use the regenerative powers of reptiles to regrow his missing arm. After some mad scientist experimenting, he turns into the fearsome Lizard, full of scales and muscles, who soon tangles with Spidey.

Rounding out the cast are Sally Field as Peter's Aunt May, Irrfan Khan as an Oscorp toady and Dennis Leary as the stern police captain who views Spider-Man with contempt -- and also happens to be Gwen's father.

"The Amazing Spider-Man" does take a while to get going. Like an epic roller-coaster climbing that first big hill, the first 75 minutes or so carefully -- sometimes painstakingly -- build up the characters and the universe. But in a moment, you can feel the movie achieve takeoff. For the next hour, it's an amazing ride of action-scene thrills and visceral twists.

Even though I found the first section slow-going at times, I realized as I was watching the latter part that the movie had earned its emotional capital so it could pay off dividends.

Webb and his trio of veteran screenwriters -- James Vanderbilt, Steve Kloves and Alvin Sargent (who also penned the last two Spider-Man films) -- clearly are gearing up for another run of several movies. There's a vague framing story involving the disappearance of Peter's parents that tickles us with possibilities without giving anything away.

Based on this strong reboot, though, I hereby withdraw any objections to more Spidey flicks.

3.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Wall Street" (1987)

With the sequel, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" arriving this week, I thought it time to take another look at the 1987 original. I hadn't seen Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning film (for Michael Douglas' bravura performance) since it came out in theaters.

Like the rest of Stone's oeuvre, it's about as subtle as a sledgehammer. But his filmmaking style is like heavy metal: When he hits the right chords, nobody plays with as much power or brash energy.

It's always fascinating what you remember from a film you saw once long ago. I had a clear memory of only two scenes: One is when slithery corporate raider Gordon Gekko (like I said, subtle) gives his "Greed is good" speech. That moment crystallized the perception of 1980s excess for decades to come.

The other involves Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), Gekko's ambitious young protege. Bud has started to become a high roller under Gekko's tutelage of insider information and manipulating stocks, and is looking at Upper East Side apartments.

The older real estate agent is quickly rushing him through a fabulous penthouse, registers his hesitation and decides the young man is out of his league. She calls him "kid," offers to show him something more downscale. Sheen has this great reaction where he tries to hide his resentment at her condescension, then casually orders, "Offer nine-fifty." Meaning, $950,000 (or about $1.8 million in today's dollars.) One senses he's buying the place just to impress her.

Other things slipped out of memory. Chief among those is Bud's affair with Darien, an ambitious interior designer played by Daryl Hannah. Despite her face appearing on the film's poster, I had completely forgotten she was even in it.

Watching the movie again, I see why: The Bud-Darien romance is the weakest thing in the movie, a totally flat and unbelievable pairing. Darien walks out the minute it appears Bud will no longer be able to support her lavish lifestyle, and we're happy to see her go.

The encounters between Charlie Sheen and his father Martin Sheen are as strong as I remember: Despite only a handful of scenes, the elder Sheen has a convincing, easy authority as Bud's father, an airline mechanic and union leader who sees right through Gekko's manipulations. He can't believe that his son makes more money than him, but is always borrowing cash to pay for lavish suits and a Manhattan apartment.

"There's no nobility in poverty anymore, Dad. One day you'll be proud of me, you'll see," Bud insists.
"It's yourself you gotta be proud of, Huckleberry," his dad advises.

I love that little nickname at the end, a combination of affection and paternal authority. Stone wrote the screenplay with Stanley Weiser, and if some elements like the portrayal of Darien don't measure up, it's still a thoroughly engrossing story with a lot of verve, sharp observation and smart dialogue.

Example: Gekko explains that he's just spent over $1 million to buy a seat on the New York Zoo board. "That's the thing you got to understand about WASPs: They love animals. They can't stand people."

Stone's timing with the original film was excellent, arriving right around the time of the big stock crash of '87. The sequel seems fortuitous as well, with the current economic downturn caused (in large part) by banks taking on too much bad credit.

I don't think "Wall Street" was an indictment of capitalism per se, but its excesses and the way unscrupulous people could cheat the markets. We're seeing that again today, where corporate executives accept -- demand, even -- lavish bonuses even as their companies are laying people off by the thousands.

The ideal of the meritocracy seems further away than ever, as long as people like Gordon Gekko are happy to game the system for their own benefit.

3.5 stars out of four