Secondhand Lions

Reviewed by:
Ben Goldstein

Secondhand Lions stars Robert Duvall and Michael Caine as violent old brothers who spend their days firing shotguns at traveling salesmen and beating the shit out of teenagers. But as awesome as that sounds, you gotta trust us on this one—it’s awful. The brothers’ seemingly idyllic lives are shattered when their harlot niece shows up to drop off her pansy son, Walter (Haley Joel Osment), while she goes to whore about Las Vegas. Hilarity most certainly does not ensue. Instead, Walter gets to know his eccentric and mysteriously wealthy uncles, listens to their many tales of youthful adventure, and discovers…something; we don’t really know. There are a couple things desperately wrong here. Osment’s voice is completely cracked-out and mid-puberty, which would be annoying enough if he wasn’t also continuously sobbing. You really want to take a claw hammer to his skull at about the midway point. And the second half of the movie is a melodramatic car wreck, with one overblown plea for tears after another. In its frantic, scattershot attempts to be heartwarming, Secondhand Lions induces the opposite reactions: rage and furious anger. In short, Haley Joel Osment should take a break from acting until his balls drop, and movie studios should stop hiring eight-year-old orphans to write their screenplays.