The Internet Movie Database Movie Reviews
A couple of rich old curmudgeonly brothers with questionable pasts are forced to take in their great nephew for the summer.
I really really wanted to like this. I liked the premise, I liked the trailers, and Michael Caine (total honey, even at his advanced age) can do no wrong in my book. Robert Duvall is playing the same character he always plays nowadays, and Haley Joel Osmont is cute as a box of kittens…it’ll be interesting to see how he grows up. So far, so good…but I digress…
Anyway. So I liked the premise, I liked a lot of the stuff that happened, much of it was charming and funny…but it really never came together. The whole story of what they did in Africa was presented _as_ a story, leading the viewer to expect it to be explained or corrected or refuted at some point later on… and although it was completely unbelieveable, no other version was ever offered…didn’t work for me…and the end, the son of the Sheik that they had escaped from finding them all of a sudden, didn’t help.
Mostly, this is a movie not to think about, just enjoy their curmudgeonly antics and ignore all that claptrap about the Foreign Legion (which the writers obviously knew nothing about, sigh).
Reality police: the lion is a young healthy teenage lion, not an old broken down zoo reject…one look at him (I think it was a shaved male, judging from the look of his neck) and you can see that he’s just full of energy and fun. Too hard to find a grown lion? hm.
theotterlimits 