A couple of home runs and stolen bases later, I’ve seen enough baseball for the year and in half the time of your regular Yankees-Red Sox game. The story of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball, “42” is a solid little sports movie filled with all of the usual tropes and cliches, if a little light on the sports action. However, for a movie trying to tell a story of one of the legends of the game, seeing the Dodgers come together as a team to win the pennant wasn’t enough to differentiate it from any other generic sports movie.

The main problem is that the movie is too consumed by its hero narrative ever to portray Robinson as less than an archetypal hero. Chadwick Boseman gave a genuinely delightful and at times powerful performance as Robinson but was ultimately limited by the script. His playful smile may thinly veil the anger seething within, but despite this, the performance never seems quite real enough.

Boseman’s best scenes turn out to be with Nicole Beharie, who plays Robinson’s wife, Rachel, as their onscreen chemistry is palpable. Nevertheless, their conversations too often remain superficial, and Rachel is never more than a concerned wife.

Although marketed as the story of Robinson, this may actually be the story of the general manager who hired him, Branch Rickey. Played by Harrison Ford, he gets as much, if not more, screen time as Robinson, and while his lines are too often filled with platitudes, Ford delivers them with a sneer that somehow makes them believable. The money-loving, Bible-quoting, integrationist Rickey is a fascinating character, but his prominence detracts from what should be the focus of the movie.

The movie is shot beautifully: full of sunshine and dust motes, but this too ends up adding to the over-polished atmosphere of the movie. Robinson’s jersey barely gets dirty, and the players don’t even sweat during spring training. The sepia-tinted goggles dissociate the movie from the present, where discussion on the movie’s themes is still important. The racism shown to Robinson is painful, especially an extended scene with the manager (played too well by Alan Tudyk) of the Philadelphia Phillies hurling racial slurs. Ultimately, though, the movie is too comfortable with Robinson as a triumphant champion to recognize that the battle is not over.

Writer/director Brian Helgeland does a fine job overall, but all I could think about during the movie was that here was another white man making a movie about a “one-in-a-million” black man. Yes, for better or worse, “42” is essentially “Django Unchained” as a sports movie. Without trying too hard, there are some uncanny parallels: Harrison Ford is to “42” what Christoph Waltz was to “Django.” The racial epithets aren’t bandied about with quite as much abandon as in “Django,” but the venom with which they’re spat at times makes PG-13 seem like a pretty lenient rating.

There are only three named black characters in the movie: the two Robinsons and Wendell Smith, played by Andre Holland, a reporter assigned to the Jackie Robinson story who serves as a part-time narrator and chauffeur but adds little else. The movie tried to limit its scope, only covering the 1946-47 seasons, but it seems like a disservice to the larger story of the fight for civil rights.

Taken as nothing more than a sports movie, “42” is a worthy addition to the canon because of its technical aspects. But sports are important for the larger narratives that we give them, and that is where this movie lacks.