Sometime since I last saw him in a movie, Haley Joel Osment's voice has changed and he has become self-conscious.

In "Secondhand Lions," the 15-year-old star looks to be about the same size as he was at age 11 in "The Sixth Sense." But gone is the precocious ease that made him so appealingly natural, even while playing a robot in Steven Spielberg's subsequent "Artificial Intelligence."

Neither of those is a favorite of mine, but they tower above this sentimental hooey by writer-director Tim McCanlies ("Dancer, Texas Pop. 81").

"Secondhand Lions" is a bit of hardscrabble mythology about two elderly brothers (Robert Duvall, Michael Caine) whose life of weary reminiscence on an isolated Texas farm is interrupted by a grandnephew (Osment) dumped at their door by his flaky mom (Kyra Sedgwick).

From their angry inhospitality, you just know the old coots are going to love this kid - and he them - before the movie ends.

A predictable outcome is not bad if it's fun getting to it. But this story is so lamely conceived and presented that it's a grind, both in its contemporary events and in flashbacks to the brothers' unlikely adventures in the French Foreign Legion.

The underpinning theme is that you need to believe in something, even if - as Duvall's Hub tells Osment's Walter - it isn't true. So, Hub and Caine's Garth, a pair of overalled hicks, spin tall tales about lost loves and heroic desert battles and Walter takes them in like air.

McCanlies dramatizes these tales as broad cartoons, yet wants us to wonder, as Walter does, whether the fortune the brothers have stashed at the farm was taken from a vanquished prince or in a series of rumored bank jobs.

Duvall and Caine have fun with their Jed Clampett shtick, a lot more fun than we have.