Many people may find it hard to take an actor seriously when most of his time is spent pile-driving people in a wrestling ring.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson does a good job playing a hard-nose football coach trying to make a difference in a juvenile hall in “Gridiron Gang.”

“The Rock” portrays Sean Porter, an officer at Camp Kilpatrick, a juvenile detention center. The film is based on a documentary with the same name that shows the real Porter struggling to make a team out of adolescent thieves, gang members, drug dealers and murderers.

The movie puts a different spin on the run-of-the-mill high-school football story. This team has a different set of problems to overcome. Many of the high school-aged boys in this movie have gang ties that immediately put a rift in the team.

The major problem between rival gangs plays out in the relationship between Willie Weathers (Jade Yorker) and Kelvin Owens (David V. Thomas). The football team brings these rival gang members to a point where they see eye to eye, which leads Weathers to save Owens’ life from one of Weathers’ own gang members.

The film does fall into some cliché football movie moments, but in each of those moments it manages to do something a little different. Many of these moments are justified because many of them really happened. At the end of the movie, clips are rolled from the original documentary giving the movie credibility.

The movie does a good job of creating characters that have depth and background, allowing the viewer to relate to the characters they are watching.

Although the movie follows a basic outline of a team overcoming adversity, losing its first couple games, then going on to make the playoffs, it develops characters along the way.

The movie shows a change in the characters but does not end saying everything was completely fixed in the end. The characters still had problems to face after they left the camp and the movie made sure to convey that.

Overall, the movie does a good job taking an overdone plot and doing a bit of rewriting.

Chris Schimmel is a film critic for the Northern Star.