"Secondhand Lions": A DVD Movie Review

I discovered the next film I'm about to review quite by accident. I'm not sure how I missed it when it first came out to DVD but I did. I caught it recently when it showed on television.

The name of the film is "Second Hand Lions." It stars Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, and Haley Joe Osment. The film centers on Osment's character, a young boy named Walter.

Walter is a lost soul, the victim of his mother's (played by Kyra Sedgwick) self-centered need to please herself rather than take care of her son. She could care less what her son wants or needs. All she cares about is having a man in her life for sexual gratification and to take care of her.

After Mae (Sedgwick) meets a new man, she decides to dump her son on the doorstep of his great uncles, Garth (Caine) and Hub (Duvall). These two confirmed bachelors are believed to be harboring a small fortune somewhere on their property; the result of their misbegotten youth. Mae, of course, hopes that Walter can make a connection with his uncles so they will want to leave some of the money to him.

Of course Walt isn't interesting in staying with his uncles and they aren't that interested in having him around. However, in spite of those facts, the three eventually make friends and become a strange, yet workable family.

Garth regales Walt with stories of their past as members of the French Foreign Legion. He tells them about Hub's great romance with a foreign princess and how he rescued the girl away from her husband, a vicious sheik.

Although Walter doesn't really believe Garth's stories, he enjoys them and suspects that there are threads of truth hidden within him. However, he eventually learns that the stories are anything but exaggerated. If anything, Garth has hidden some of the more adventurous aspects.

While the men's distant relatives all try to ingratiate themselves in order to get part of their fortune, Walter wonders how they can't see what they are missing by not getting to know the men better. He finds that he is perfectly comfortable living with these odd men who have no idea what it takes to raise a young boy, but nonetheless offer him unconditional love.