Here, the “Boys” just want to have fun. And that’s the problem. In Clive Owen’s engaging “The Boys Are Back,” from “Shine” director Scott Hicks, a recent widower and his sons have trouble facing their emotions. Until they are eventually forced to do that, they turn a remote Aussie homestead into a blokes-only clubhouse of filth and frolic.
Roughly based on the memoir “The Boys Are Back in Town” by Simon Carr, Allan Cubitt’s screenplay follows a British sports journalist living down under with his stunning young wife, Katy (Laura Fraser), and their precocious 6-year-old, Artie (played by irresistible Nicholas McAnulty). Within a few minutes of the start of the drama, Katy abruptly dies of cancer. In exasperation — and in defiance of his mother-in-law, unfairly demonized here — a bereft Joe Warr (Owen) quickly falls into the daredevil single parenting philosophy of “Just say yes.”
