CLIVE Owen’s astringent, good- natured performance saves “The Boys Are Back,” an uneven quasi-weepie about a newly widowed father raising two boys on his own in Australia.
It’s loosely based on a memoir by Brit expat political writer Simon Carr, called Joe Warr in the movie, where he is now a hard-drinking sportswriter.
When his second wife dies of cancer, the workaholic Joe is left to raise 6-year-old Artie (Nicholas McAnulty). He barely knows this somewhat feral child, whom he attempts to raise with a “Just say yes” policy, including letting Artie ride on the windshield of a car he’s driving along the beach.
Australian director Scott Hicks, who has directed a variety of awful American movies (“Snow Falling on Cedars,” “Without Reservations”) since he broke through in his native country with “Shine,” offers far too many travelogue shots in the movie’s sluggish first half.
Aside from the mild objections of his wife’s mother (Julia Blake) to Joe’s self-described “free-range” parenting, there’s nothing in the way of dramatic conflict until the arrival of Harry (George MacKay of “Defiance”), his teenage son from his first marriage in England.
Harry is not particularly sympathetic to Joe’s struggle to balance work and parenting, to put it mildly.
The situation comes to a head when Joe — who, rather incredibly, has been “covering” the Australian Open by watching it on TV — even more irresponsibly leaves his two sons alone when he travels to Melbourne for the final match.
“Kramer vs. Kramer” it’s not. Then again, it isn’t as if there have been a lot of movies about male single parents also dealing with the fallout from an earlier divorce.
The actors playing the sons are very natural, as is Emma Booth as the mother of one of Artie’s classmates with whom Joe conducts a chaste courtship.
“The Boys Are Back” is not a perfect movie — but you can’t do much better than Owen, who beautifully plays against his darkly brooding persona. He grounds potentially schmaltzy scenes in which he has conversations with his late wife (Laura Fraser) and sheds a few tears.