Secondhand Lions gets 3 out of 4 stars from me. It had its ups and downs, but over all it was a good movie. Mae, a filthy little gold-digger needs a break for the summer from being a mother, so she dumps her son, Walter off at a ranch in Texas which belongs to her long-lost uncles, who are rumored to have millions stashed away some where. Hub and Garth don’t need a little kid running around ruing their day of ice tea drinking and shooting at sales men, but they warmed up to him in the end because Walter annoyed the rest of the greedy family.
On Walter’s first night at his Uncles’ he finds a photograph of a beautiful women which he figures out why his Uncle Hub sleep walks at night. Garth entertains the boy with a fantastical tale about the bother’s time with the French Foreign Legion in Africa, and Hub’s tragic romance with a princess from Arabia, named Jasmine. The stories told to Walter are filled with adventure, action, suspense, humor, and envy, which capture the boy’s imagination. There is sword fighting, killing, revenge, and a lot more. The stories told to Walter lacked nothing in my opinion. They were made up of everything that makes a story come alive.
Walter gets his uncles to stop shooting the traveling sales men and gets them to start buying from them. They buy vegetables all the way to a lion. Garth and Hub planned on shooting the poor creature before they realized it was just an old zoo outcast. So they let Walter keep it, which he named her Jasmine. Garth has taken to slow retirement, but Hub can’t handle doing nothing and just being a useless old man. He thinks what else does he have to live for when the love of his life was dead. So he decides not to just sit around. He gets into fights with teenagers and starts to build a plane. Walter snaps his Uncle Hub out of his slum, and gets him to promise him to stick around till he is out of college, so he can hear the man speech for himself.
In the beginning Walter just thought the stories he heard from his Uncle Garth were well, just plain stories, but in the end he realized they weren’t. He learned that they were really true. The movie ends with Uncle Garth and Hub dieing at the age of 90 from a plan crash. Walter is called back to Texas from his comic book world, to read the will of his diseased Uncles. The will states: The kid gets everything. Just when he finishes a helicopter comes from out of no where and lands in the field. Out steps the grandson of The Sheik, who was madly in love with Jasmine, and his son. It was then that Walter truly knew the stories from his past were real.