The hillbillies are alive

Here is a film full of people you only ever meet in the movies. Fourteen-year-old Walter (Haley Joel Osment) is sent by his uncaring mother to be raised by his mysterious, ageing great-uncles (Michael Caine and Robert Duvall).

They are nuts. They sit on the porch of their decrepit Texan manor with their guns and outdated magazines taking potshots at visiting salesmen. But slowly, they come to like Walter, and the three have a fairly good time growing corn and adopting a lioness rejected from a zoo.

Osment is a strange proposition: he looks as small as he did in the Sixth Sense but his voice has since broken and he speaks as though he is providing a voiceover for some documentary about ducks in an oil slick.

While he wanders around making himself extremely difficult to like, explaining the underlying tragedy of everything, his face all crinkled up with too-adult emotion and what looks like glued-on bushy eyebrows, Caine and Duvall, at least, are entertainingly mad.

By far the best bits, though, are the spoofy flashbacks to the uncles' life in the post-Second World War Foreign Legion, with Duvall remembering himself as a kind of Indiana Jones with even bigger thighs and a defence policy that includes killer swordplay and kissing the face off some girl in a sari.

I would like to have seen more of this, but we are always being dragged into the present, with the elderly Caine reminding Duvall to take it easy, and Duvall telling Caine to bugger off.

Caine doesn't even try to bung on a Texan accent, but it doesn't matter much. There is something very posthumous and tender about his performance, as though he is secretly planning to scale Everest and never come back.

Duvall, on the other hand, looks as though he is still enjoying the smell of napalm in the morning. He wears a bobble hat like a big game fisherman, and it's quite a shock when he takes it off and turns into Alistair Simm in Scrooge - with an electric combover, and gums like crabmeat.

Secondhand Lions
Cert: certPG