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Secondhand Lions
A boy, two old-timers, a lion and a pig. Not the first line of a tortuous joke, but the recipe for a yarn from writer-director Tim McCanlies. Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Haley Joel Osment star
He saw dead people in The Sixth Sense. He played a robot in A.I.. But one suspects Haley Joel Osment's greatest challenge lies ahead of him: how to make the leap from child acting prodigy to juvenile leading man. For now, he's content to tread water as a nervous 15-year-old boy in 60s Texas, forced to spend the summer with his two crotchety grand-uncles on their rundown ranch. But as Haley grows older, and taller, his days of playing sensitive, nervous adolescents are surely numbered. On the contrary, there seems to be no end to the stream of elderly eccentrics that Robert Duvall and Michael Caine can bring to the screen. Watching these cinema veterans is the best reason to see Tim McCanlies' gentle fable, a couple of feisty geriatrics trying to recreate the glory days of their youth. Whether firing shotguns at travelling salesmen, fighting unruly teenagers in the local store or infuriating the highway patrol in their homemade biplane, this ornery duo pumps the picture with premium grade Pensioner Power. Though their initial reaction to Walter (Osment) is one of open hostility - "The last thing we need is some little sissy boy hanging round all summer," barks Garth (Caine) - it isn't long before the older men warm to their charge. Walter, though, has a hidden agenda - to find the loot Hub (Duvall) supposedly purloined while serving as a Foreign Legionnaire. Juggling flashbacks to Hub's exotic past with more sedate scenes in Texas, where the old codgers pass the time gardening, bickering and buying an old circus lion for target practice, this coming-of-age story may be too leisurely for some. Others, however, will appreciate the homespun, old-fashioned virtues of a good tale well told. Verdict Sentimental, yes. Schmaltzy, definitely. But Secondhand Lions gets by on the charisma of its seasoned leads, whose grizzled charm more than makes up for Haley Joel Osment's increasingly irritating presence. |
