I watched "Secondhand Lions" fearing that like so many movies all the best parts were already in the trailer and this 2003 film would be a disappointment. Instead, I was happy to see that writer-director Tim McCanlies's film exceeded expectations. The story begins with a man named Walter (Josh Lucas) getting a phone call from a sheriff about his uncles. It sounds like bad news but before we can find out we have dissolved into the past where Walter is now a 12-year-old boy (Haley Joel Osment) who is being dumped by his flighty mother (Kyra Sedgwick) on two uncles he never knew he had.
They are actually his great-uncles, Garth (Michael Caine) and Hub (Robert Duvall), and while his mother insists that he has to do this because she is going off to court reporting school she keeps talking about the fact that these two old guys have got a lot of money buried someplace on the farm and either he can find out where it is or become so beloved by them that they will remember him in their will. There is another set of relatives who come for the weekend in their Sunday go to meeting clothes and they are not happy to see any competition. As for Garth and Hub, they like to sit on the front porch and shoot their shotguns at the salesman that come along and there are a lot of those, because it seems everybody knows that the two old coots have a lot of money and their own theory about how they got their hands on it in the first place.
There are no surprises here in that we know the young boy and the two old men are going to change each other. When one salesman actually has the nerve to come back and face those shotguns a second time it is Walter who suggests maybe they should find out what the guy is selling. That marks the beginning of a lot of changes as Garth and Hub start to buy a lot of things from seeds (mostly corn apparently) to a giraffe and, as the title indicates, a used lion. Actually a used lioness, who becomes the pet that Walter never had ("Secondhand Giraffe" does not have the same sense of flair apparently).
Most of the best parts of this film have Garth and Hub engaging in their eccentricities. They like to use their shotguns to fish and when a bunch of young hotheads try to pick a fight Hub at least is more than willing to show them the error of their ways (he also gives them another chance after showing them the correct way to use a knife). For his part Garth spends time now and then telling Walter the story behind Hub's habit of sleepwalking in the middle of the night. The story has to do with the young Garth (Kevin Haberer) and Hub (Christian Kane, a familiar face from the televison's "Angel"), who ended up in the French Foreign Legion and had some rather unbelievable adventures with a beautiful woman named Jasmine (Emmanuelle Vaugier) and a dastardly Sheik (Adam Ozturk).
The story might be unbelievable, but Walter has been getting bits and pieces of Hub's special speech that he always gives to young men. Walter is not old enough to get the whole speech yet, but the key part is apparently that being able to believe in something is important, even if what you believe in is not true. Of course the climax of this film involves young Walter coming to understand this great truth. This helps the message of this coming of age film work for youngsters watching the film who have neither a secondhand lion nor a pair of eccentric uncles in their lives.
While getting used to Haley Joel Osment's deeper voice is going to prove difficult for some people, the chief joy here is watching Duvall act just a bit nut and Caine lay on the American accent. Duvall is the most eccentric of the pair but Caine has this nice ability to manipulate his brother while still seeming to play the second fiddle. There is a rather neat payoff to what happens to Walter when he grows up as a result of this rather unique childhood but the film really does not have time to let us enjoy that at the end of the film. It will, however, compel you to watch the credits for a few additional tidbits.