2 hours of pure magic, 2 Hollywood legends: Stream this warm blanket of a movie for free before it leaves Tubi
Sometimes, the best stories we hear growing up are the ones our relatives swear are true. "Secondhand Lions" is all about those tall tales our families tell, and how they can shape our lives. This 2003 film teams up Robert Duvall and Michael Caine as a couple of ornery Texas bachelors with a slightly older Haley Joel Osment, a few years out from "The Sixth Sense".
The story follows Walter (Osment), a shy kid whose flighty mother dumps him on his great-uncles Hub (Duvall) and Garth (Caine) for the summer because she's heard the two old men are sitting on a hidden fortune. Walter expects a long, dull stretch in the middle of nowhere. What he gets instead is Garth's account of Hub's younger years, and a friendship that changes all of their lives for good. And you also get a chance to point and say, "Look! Haley Joel got older!" like you might have if you saw this movie when it originally debuted.
But it's an excellent film in many ways, and it's well worth watching, especially now that it's about ready to leave Tubi. Duvall and Caine play off each other like men who've been bickering for forty years, and Osment holds his own right between them. It runs just under two hours, and it's a rare find that you can put on for the whole family. Here's why you can and should stream it free on Tubi right now before it disappears.
What is 'Secondhand Lions' about?
It's the 1960s, and Walter's (Osment) mother, Mae (Kyra Sedgwick), drops him at a run-down farm in the Texas heat and drives off. His great-uncles, Hub (Duvall) and Garth (Caine), don't want him there. They shoot at traveling salesmen from the porch while their greedy relatives keep asking about their rumored fortune. Walter is left to figure out two men who answer almost nothing. Then he finds a photograph of a beautiful woman hidden in the attic, and Garth starts talking.
He has tons of stories to tell, some about the French Foreign Legion, a fortune won abroad, a duel that spared a sheikh, and Hub's marriage to an Arabian princess named Jasmine who died in childbirth. The uncles also blow some of the supposed money on a lion.
Everything comes to a head when Mae returns with a sleazy boyfriend who wants to know where the money is, and Walter has to decide who he believes and where he actually belongs.
Don't miss streaming 'Secondhand Lions' for free
There's a speech near the end of the movie that I think about more than I'd like to admit. Hub sits Walter down and lays out what a young man ought to believe: that people are basically good, honor and courage matter more than money, and that good wins in the end. And you believe it all because it's worth believing. It's kind of similar to my own worldview, and it's comforting to hear in a movie that already feels like a warm blanket.
It's all practically tailor-made to be a comfort watch. There's the realism of the farm, and then there's the golden swashbuckling flashback world where Josh Lucas plays a young Hub charging through the desert. The movie never quite tells you how much of it to take at face value, and it's all the more mysterious for it.
I won't spoil the last few minutes, but they do answer whether any of Garth's stories were true, though. "Secondhand Lions" is warm and funny while it flirts with out-there tales, and it's over in just around two hours. It'll stick around a lot longer than that in your mind, though. If you want something with some actual heart to put on tonight, start here -- and don't miss it before Tubi shelves it.
Stream "Secondhand Lions" free on Tubi"
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