Ron Howard, good ol' Ron Howard, is back in sturdy form with "Thirteen Lives," a tense, nervy procedural thriller based on the 2018 incident in which a youth soccer team and its coach were saved from a flooded cave in Thailand while the world watched on breathlessly from afar.
Howard's film is unflashy and dismisses Hollywood fireworks in its depiction of the painstaking step-by-step process of the high-risk mission and evacuation. Real-life heroes don't come with capes or slow-motion entrances, and neither do the brave men in Howard's grounded, solid telling.
A group of boys is playing soccer one afternoon, and after practice (and before one of their birthday parties, which will include a SpongeBob SquarePants birthday cake), they make a stop at the Tham Luang Nang Non cave, in northern Thailand's Tham Luang–Khun Nam Nang Non Forest Park.
