The Disney Corporation must be consulting their lawyers after this flagrant breach of their monopoly on sentimental family sagas.
Grumpy old brothers Hub (Duvall) and Garth (Caine) live a private life on their ramshackle farm in the middle of rural Texas.
Local rumour has it that in a previous life they were bank robbers, Mafia hitmen or escaped war criminals, which would explain their seemingly limitless cash.
For their part, they're quite happy to let the gossip persist as long as nobody bothers them (apart from the routine visits of a family of grasping relatives and travelling salesman at whom who they take potshots).
However, the idyll is shattered with the arrival on their rickety porch of 14-year-old Walter (Joel Osment), the son of flighty Mae (Sedgewick).
"We don't know anything about kids. If you want something you'll have to find it yourself," is about as welcoming as the old gits get.
However, as time passes Walter gets to know something about them and the mysterious missing 40 years when the brothers disappeared to Europe.
It appears they enjoyed a camaraderie which would most tellingly be evoked by Rolf Harris in his evergreen classic Two Little Boys.
The brothers were shanghai-ed into the French Foreign Legion and battled as anti-slave trade mercenaries against Bedouin bandits.
Flashbacks, in a bargain basement Indiana Jones style, reveal that Hub was in love with an African princess...but never lets on exactly what happened.
Filmed through a rose-tinted lens, life appears pretty idyllic for Walter as he warms towards his guardians and they even let him keep a lion, albeit a circus reject.
Caine and Duvall are amenable old curmudgeons and Joel Osment does a fair approximation of your stereotypical American kid.
However, the style, both old-fashioned and not a little cloying, is reminiscent of the sort of fare served up in children's Saturday matinees.
There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but perhaps today's youth may find they've got more pressing engagements at the weekend.
Tim Evans
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