Even though there's an actual used, broken-down lion in the film, the title of Secondhand Lions refers to its two senior characters, who realize they've already seen their best days and are merely frittering away time until the Grim Reaper comes a-knockin'.  This hardly sounds like fare for a PG-rated family film, but that's what Lions attempts to accomplish.  The effort is mostly successful, unless you're put off by the movie's reckless gunplay, or its mental and physical abuse of a very confused child.

Lions is largely set in 1950s middle-of-nowhere Texas, where a pair of crazy old coots have settled into a giant, decrepit farmhouse after spending about 40 years roaming the world and getting into trouble.  What exactly that trouble was is anyone's guess, though most believe it resulted in the accumulation of millions of dollars, which are presumably hidden somewhere on their large, dusty estate.  The money is one of the reasons their niece (Kyra Sedgwick, Personal Velocity) dumps her 12-year-old son Walter (Haley Joel Osment, AI) on their doorstep for an undetermined length of time while she speeds off on a mission for man-meat.

Not only is Walter forced to deal with abandonment issues, he also has to come to grips with the potentially insane uncles he's never once laid eyes on previously.  They have no telephone or television, and the crabby codgers seem content to spend their days sipping iced tea on the porch and blasting shotgun rounds at anyone who dares bother them (salesmen, other money-grubbing relatives, etc.).  As if that weren't eccentric enough, Walter spies Uncle Hub (Robert Duvall, Assassination Tango) sleepwalking and wielding a plunger like a sword. 

When Walter asks Garth (Michael Caine, The Quiet American) what Hub was up to, that's when we get plunged into flashbacks detailing the lives of the uncles in their youth, which are doled out slowly and involve service in the French Foreign Legion, swashbuckling and an Arab princess.  As one would expect, Walter grows closer and closer to the curmudgeons, culminating in a finale I'm sure even most kids could figure out.

The attraction here, other than some pretty photography from Jack N. Green (an Oscar nominee for the similarly dusty Unforgiven), is the opportunity to see Duvall and Caine act together, and for the most part their performances drive the film.  Osment, on the other hand, still looks frighteningly robotic with those coin-slot eyes, and now adds a squeaky, Peter Brady-style voice to the mix.  He isn't bad by any means, but he's in that awkward period between kid and teenager, and that whole transformation doesn't really need to be viewed on such a large scale.

Storywise, I expected a bit more from writer-director Tim McCanlies, who penned the script for the far more enjoyable The Iron Giant.  Lions runs a little long and plays a bit clumsy for a film that too often tries to jump from slapstick to drama to action thriller.

1:51 -

for thematic material, language and action violence