C+

It’s a really familiar story: a lonely, bullied little boy develops an unlikely friendship with a cantankerous old man, and the relationship has a salutary effect on them both, though it involves both laughter and tears. We’ve seen this many times before, and “Is Anybody There?” doesn’t offer many new wrinkles to the mix.

What it does have is Michael Caine. He plays The Amazing Clarence, a retired small-time magician in the first stages of Alzheimer’s who’s an unwilling new resident in the old folks’ home called Lark Hill, run by a thirty-something couple (Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey). Their ten-year old son Edward (Bill Milner) is a solitary kid pushed around at school. He has an obsession with ghosts, and secretly tape-records the flutter of activity surrounding recently-deceased residents in hopes of securing evidence of their continued spectral presence.

The initial meetings between grumpy Clarence and nervous Edward are, of course, hostile, but they inevitably warm to, and try to assist, one another, with the old man teaching the kid magic tricks and the boy hoping to help with the magician’s depression over the loss of the wife he dearly loved. There are some detours from the purely predictable in the ways these matters are drawn out, but for the most part the route is pretty predictable.

So are the ultra-cute characterizations of the other Lark Hill residents, who are a veritable stock company of eccentric duffers; and even though they’re played by troopers like Rosemary Harris (an erstwhile dance instructor with a game leg), Leslie Phillips (the abstracted ex-military man she has her eye on), and Peter Vaughan (a palsied man), none are given sufficient shading to emerge as anything but caricatures. And a subplot about the dad’s infatuation with the local girl (Linzey Cocker) who serves as the establishment’s general nurse-aide—something that the Edward finds out about, causing a rift between him and his father—comes across as a clumsy device to draw the thin story out to feature length.

Still, Caine commands attention in any role, and he certainly brings a great deal of authority to Clarence, balancing the surly and maudlin aspects of the part more skillfully than most other actors could have done. Of course he’s one of those people who bring to any performance such a reservoir of good will in viewers, built up after decades of familiarity, that you’re prone to overlook the obviousness of some of his choices. He’s surprisingly well matched by young Milner (from the dreadful “Son of Rambow”), who happily gives Edward a touch of anger and nastiness that keeps him from seeming the namby-pamby nice kid he might have been.

Nonetheless one might have expected more of director John Crowley, whose “Boy A” was a stunningly authentic portrait of a young ex-con’s struggle to find his way in the outside world in the face of understandable public anger over the heinous crime he committed as a child. “Is Anybody There?” simply isn’t in the same league, partially at least because Crowley’s work just doesn’t exhibit the same degree of assurance as in the earlier picture. But much of his failure is probably just a result of having to deal with the script that, for all Peter Harness’ efforts to add quirky touches to it, mostly comes across as more of the same.

As a vehicle for Caine to do the crotchety old man routine, however, “Is Anybody There?” could have been worse.