An excellent cast, including Robert Duvall, Michael Caine, Haley Joel Osment and Kyra Sedgwick, underperforms in Secondhand Lions, an intermittently pleasing but rather predictable film.

The movie never really roars. Still, it could attract a sizeable family audience as there are no new family movies in the market now.

A timid 14 year-old boy Walter (Osment) lives with his mother Mae (Sedgwick) in Texas in the early 1960s. She is more interested in getting a date than in his happiness. Walter, who doesn't have a father around, has to fend for himself.

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When Mae hears that her rich uncles Hub (Duvall) and Garth (Caine) are back in Texas after being away for a very long time, she deposits Walter at their rundown farmhouse, unannounced, for the summer. She hopes Walter can find the millions the two men have reportedly stashed away after a bank robbery.

Writer-director Tim McCanlies, whose screenplay for the wonderful but largely unappreciated (by the audience) The Iron Giant got him this project, takes us into this coming-of-age story without offering us major surprises or plot twists.

The two uncles try to ignore the boy, but Garth, the gentler of the two, softens first and tells the boy stories of how he and Hub went on a wild adventure spree in Arabia and Africa in the 1920s. Their adventures included Hub rescuing a princess from a domineering and nasty sheikh.

When Hub eventually accepts the kid, he also buys a toothless lion for him. Like many other things in the film, the lion, which serves as a metaphor, is also a trite touch.

Duvall (Open Range) and Caine (The Quiet American) are reasonably engaging, but we have seen them do far better work. Osment seldom looks comfortable.

If the film had more genuinely eccentric moments, a few more decent funny scenes, and real sentimentality, it would have roared mighty in this season of lacklustre films.

CREDITS:
Cast: Robert Duvall, Michael Caine, Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick
Story-Direction: Tim McCanlies
Running time: 105 minutes
Rating: PG for thematic material, language and violence
Producer: New Line Cinema