Secondhand Lions (2004, VHS)

Secondhand Lions had all the intent of being a "coming of age" story for a young boy named Walter. Walter has been dragged around by his mother, often ending up leaving him someplace while she goes off to search for a man. He has grown tired of the same routine, often catching his mother in lies about what she claims to be doing. In the latest occurrence, she has decided to leave Walter with two Great Uncles presumably to go attend classes at a school. At least this is what she says, but we will soon find out that it is just another one of her lines. Leaving him with the two Uncles, she explains that there is a rumor they had come into a lot of money recently and were hoarding it at their residence. She tasks him with finding it, and helping her use it to build a home that they can call their own. Of course Walter sees right through the scheme, but really lacks the self-confidence to stand up to his mother and her intentions.

Walter could best be described a shell of a boy, doing only what he is told, and fearing a lot of what the world has to offer. When he is suddenly left with these two much older men, he is faced with many new realizations of what it really takes to survive in this world. At first the two Uncles seem like men you should be afraid of, but he slowly starts to see the good within each one, and as he learns about them through the rehashing of their past, we get to see Walter grow up before our very eyes. This is where what could have been a great story goes a little astray in my opinion, as it hurries to instill specific thoughts in the minds of the audience, rather than letting the story play itself out. At the same time, there are too many loose ends that just don't let the story be emotional enough, and to its detriment the writing dumbs down the film to a point where it was frustrating. Where they could have made this into a great story, they instead tried to present everything in a clean cookie-cutter film.

Playing Walter we have Haley Joel Osmet, trying to make the transition from child superstar to teen film-star. He is good enough with the material given to him, but there are times when it seems he reverts back to being 9 or 10 in the maturity of this character, and I felt it harmed how the film showed Walter's progression. There were parts of his growing up that ended up slipping back to a stage that I would have believed the character to have "out-grown" in a matter of speaking. Cast as the two Uncles are Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, who were both great choices for the roles of the two crotchety old men, but who also were not given quite enough material to work with in their parts. The final role, the mother of Walter, was played by Kyra Sedgwick, but in this instance I don't think she was cast correctly for the manner in which her character needed to be portrayed. Her part was about a woman feeling that she needs a man to be complete, but I think Kyra as an actress is too strong to play that roll convincingly enough, and for me it didn't seem believable.

As the story progresses, we get to see many glimpses of the two Uncles before the ended up at this farm house. The flashbacks themselves are often broken up into many different sequences, and pieced together through the voice of Michael Kaine. Though interesting at times, and definitely full of potential, the story almost too easily moves from one scene to the next. There is no inherent drama in the writing, there are no thoughts about "what will happen next", and the film doesn't provide anything more than you see on the screen. For a story that was intended to be something deep, Secondhand Lions really failed at living up to its own potential. The characters of Caine and Duvall are interesting enough to watch, and at times very funny, but I really needed more depth from their stories, and a little less character acting for this one to work. Where I had once had high hopes that the film would be a great story of growing up, I was instead left disappointed by a story that could have been so much more, if only the script writers had taken the time to focus more on the details. Watchable once maybe on television, this isn't a film that I could recommend seeing a second time, nor is it one I would recommend purchasing.