Owen deserves better than script for 'Boys'

Particular fans of Clive Owen will want to see him in "The Boys Are Back," and maybe they should.

Owen gets to take off the tuxedo, gets to stop being angry, cool and all of those other self-protective states he's usually called upon to play.

Instead, he takes on the role of something resembling a regular guy: one going through some difficult, though not very exotic or exciting, life difficulties, like fear, grief and raising a family.

Owen acquits himself well. He has a gentleness here that's appealing, and at the same time, that movie-star quality he has comes in handy, whenever he has to talk to one of the pretty divorced mothers in the PTA.

Owen is a magnetic, sensitive presence at the center of a movie that doesn't deserve him and that barely deserves to be seen, and then only as an example of what Owen can do, ideally, elsewhere.

If you don't know going in, it's obvious within 10 minutes that "The Boys Are Back" is based on a true story, and not in a good way.

It's obviously true; otherwise why would anyone think it's worth telling a story so trivial? And why would anybody want to tell a story that hardly feels like a story at all, but rather like a collection of disparate uninteresting incidents?

And, finally, if the characters weren't standing in for real prototypes, why would a film make them so unappealing, and then assume that we'll care about them?

"The Boys Are Back" is based on a memoir by Simon Carr, a political writer. For the sake of jazzing things up, the movie has fictionalized him somewhat. Now he's Joe Warr (Owen), a sportswriter. Joe has a great marriage, and then the wife (Laura Fraser) gets sick in the way people always get sick in movies, and in a way that can turn regular filmgoers into paranoid hypochondriacs.

It comes precisely at a moment of peak happiness and totally out of nowhere, the stomachache that turns out, of course, to be the harbinger of terminal illness.

Next thing you know, the undertaker is carrying off the body, and Joe is left as the sole parent of a grief-stricken and confused 7-year-old boy (Nicholas McAnulty).

He has to overcome his own grief to deal with the boy's, plus keep up with his responsibilities as a major sportswriter. Joe has another son, a young teenager by his previous wife, and soon that kid has arrived to spend a few months. So it's three men under the same roof, without any civilizing feminine presence.

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