MOVIE REVIEW: The Boys Are Back
© A.J. Malouin 2009
(Rating: 17 by The Film Snob.)
(See our side-bar page “How Caryl & Al and The Film Snob Rate Movies”)
(2009/Australia/UK. Directed by Scott Hicks.)
Here’s a movie that’s soooooo uneven you want to take a Steam Roller to it…and permaybe throw yourself under that Steam Roller so that you don’t have to watch the third act. Yet in our preview screening of “The Boys Are Back” most audience members found something to like.
If you like to watch Clive Owen (and lettuce face it, Girls, who of us doesn’t!) you are going to mesmerized by what you see.
If you are not enamoured of Clive Owen, however you are going to be squirm-rolling-your-eyes through a fair amount of the glop that is this story.
A good-looking and glib sports writer (Owen!) in Australia loses his second wife to cancer. He is left alone with a six-year-old boy. Meanwhile, a teenage boy in England, from his first wife — whom his abandoned when he made his cancer-dead wife pregnant — comes to visit him in Australia.
How this single Dad is going to survive and raise the six-year-old, while also regaining the affection of the son that he abandoned, is the thread of this movie.
There are some very-touching, almost-tear-drop-inducing scenes between the Owen-father and his two sons…and between the two sons of different mothers.
There is. OTOH, a LOT of ham-handed interactions and dialogue handed to all the people acting in this movie. It’s, of course, mostly the script’s fault that we want to run screaming into the crisp Autumn night time.
As we say, the movie does have its moments. There’s some little nice scenery, both with Australian kangaroos, and with the English Boarding Schools.
The six-year-old’s grandparents are both empathetic (and sympathetic!) characters.
But the movie spends tooooooo much time showing us the Mom who is dying of cancer.
Worse yet, the now-dead Mom inexplicably appears to have child-raising conversations with the Owen character.
This inexplicable appearance of the dead woman, now apparently cancer-free, would be enough to make our eyeballs roll back in their orbits, IF we were not already sweetly face-down, clutching our stomachs with the unevenness of the roller-coaster ride we have been taking.
Watching the Clive Owen character weep over the death of his wife is enough to make us all want to cry…and perhaps pray for a stand-in.
It’s a quibble, granted, but even the title of the movie is uneven and could use a rewrite. “The Boys Are Back” is apparently taken from the Australian working title of the project, “The Boys Are Back in Town.” The fact is, however, that only one of the boys is back: the teenage son.
So? This is a totally uneven, less-than-average movie.
Unless, of course, you are a Clive Owen fan.
If you’re a fan, “The Boys Are Back” is Simply Resistible!!!
(1 hr 44 [although it seems achingly longer.] Rated PG-13 in the USA for some sexual language and thematic elements. In English. With Clive Owen as Joe Warr, Laura Fraser, Emma Booth, George MacKay as Harry, Erik Thomson as Digby, Nicholas McAnulty as the six-year-old boy, Natasha Little as Flick, Emma Lung as Mia, and Alexandra Schepisi as Mother, among many other talented actors.)