There aren’t many movies that advertise themselves as treatises on masculine love. Look hard, however, and you can find them. Try as it might, “Secondhand Lions” (2003) isn’t one of those wistful, sepia-toned, “written and directed by” pieces of sugar candy that help one pass a lazy Sunday afternoon. It isn’t simply two feral geezers and an abandoned kid trying to figure each other out in rural 1960s Somewhere. It helps that Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Haley Joel Osment are the principals, but underneath the tall-tale bluster, there’s a heart to this film, and it’s shared by those three.
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According to the credits, “The Fourth Protocol” (1987) is based on a novel by Frederick Forsyth. I never read the book, but the film is so weighed down with Cold War spy movie boilerplate, it’s amazing that Michael Caine didn’t get a hernia starring in it. It’s one of TV star Pierce Brosnan’s first major film roles (he plays a Soviet spy to Caine’s stock British spy). The worst part is that several Soviet characters are played by American actors who use their regular speaking voices. You can’t tell whether they’re actual Soviets, American double agents, or what. Very aggravating.
There are plenty of movies about two guys trying to outdo one another, but none quite like “The Prestige” (2006). Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play a pair of magicians who duel to the bitter end. And I do mean bitter. And I do mean end. The first half is tedious and non-sequential, which is, as usual, more work than art (something filmmakers refuse to understand). Once the time sequence gets a little straighter, the pace picks up. False climaxes are layered with macabre worthy of Poe. And then you get blindsided with the oldest trick in the storyteller’s book.
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