Trying so hard to be quirky and loveable that it hurts to watch, Secondhand Lions foists a phoney coming-of-age story on us, and in the process wastes the wonderful Robert Duvall, forces Michael Caine to struggle with a southern U.S. drawl that he’s not quite up to, and exposes Haley Joel Osment as a child actor who appears to be losing his charmed status as he stumbles into puberty.
Caine and Duvall play a pair of eccentric and reclusive brothers hiding out on a modest farm, spending most of their time sitting on their porch, contemplating old age, and taking pot-shots at the many travelling salesmen and investment hucksters who venture up their driveway. Enter Walter (Osment), Garth and Hub’s great nephew, who is dumped off by his self-centred mother (Kyra Sedgewick) for the summer, so she can head off to have some fun. Naturally, the two old curmudgeons are testy about this initially, and just as naturally, they soon warm to their guest and begin one of those ‘amazing and unforgettable summers while growing up’ that only happen in the movies. There’s a pet lion, rumours of a huge cache of cash on the farm, Garth’s stories of African adventures, and Hub’s heroics beating up four young thugs at a time – just after stomping out of the hospital following a collapse (that lion kibble comes in awfully heavy bags, you see).
It’s all about as contrived as you can get, and while Duvall could be convincing playing a blind lesbian piano tuner, he can’t save this smarmy ‘feel good’ yawner. Caine, despite the half-English, half-Texan accent, manages to hold his own, despite the material. Sadly, we can’t say the same for Osment, whose over-acting is an embarrassment. What worked when he was three feet tall just isn’t working now that he’s approaching young manhood. Let’s hope he can work on rediscovering subtlety so he doesn’t end up co-starring in the sequel to Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Now, I suppose Osment shouldn’t feel too bad, as Sedgewick overacts as much as he does.
The problem here is that writer/ director Tim McCanlies (Dancer, Texas Pop. 81) doesn’t seem to know when enough is enough. Garth and Hub are quirky, their house is quirky, they dress quirkily (admittedly, their gardening duds are quite humorous), their obsequious inheritance-seeking relatives are quirky, and even their pets – four mix-and-match dogs and a pig – are quirky. It’s just so much quirkiness that it quickly becomes unbearable.
On the other hand, some of it works. Garth’s adventure stories, supposedly of the brothers’ earlier exploits in Africa – are portrayed in a cartoonish style that works fairly well. If only the entire rest of the movie wasn’t so loaded down with contrivances, these scenes could have been the basis for a really good heartstring-tugger of a movie. Instead, it’s just loveable scene after loveable scene, with the outcome pretty obvious from early on, and not nearly enough surprises along the way. Secondhand Lions lacks the deft touch of McCanlies’ screenplay for The Iron Giant, perhaps because with the latter he was working from a screen story written by someone else.
If you find it easy to go along with sentimental manipulations, then maybe you’ll be able to cut this one enough slack to make a viewing a fun time. But for me, it just seems like too much wasted potential. The concept, while not exactly original, is a solid one, but the execution here is simply ham-handed.
