Seven Days in Utopia

Movie Review

Linking God and golf leads nowhere

September 02, 2011|By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

Lucas Black plays a hotheaded golfer and Robert Duvall is a former pro who… (Utopia llc )

SEVEN DAYS IN UTOPIA

Directed by: Matthew Dean Russell

Written by: Russell, Rob Levine, Sandra Thrift, and David L. Cook, adapted from Cook’s book “Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia’’

Starring: Lucas Black, Melissa Leo, Kathy Baker, Deborah Ann Woll, Brian Geraghty, and Robert Duvall

At: AMC Methuen, AMC Liberty Tree, and AMC Framingham

Running time: 98 minutes

Rated: G (but, really, why subject a child to this?)

If I understand “Seven Days in Utopia,’’ some guys spend their entire day thinking about golf, and God thinks those guys are crazy. They should be thinking about Him. So when the rageaholic professional golfer Luke Chisolm (Lucas Black) receives golf tips from an old codger (Robert Duvall), we’re not to be fooled: These are really the Lord’s life lessons. But any movie that instructs us, as this one does, to visit a website to find out how its final scene ends is the opposite of Lordly.

The website isn’t scheduled to go live until the movie opens, which means it couldn’t be viewed in time for this review. But I don’t need to see it to know it’s a nutty development. Some movies are unfinished and don’t know they are. The inconclusiveness is premeditated. You buy a ticket for a movie; it turns into a recruitment tool. But for what? Page views? Congregants? Someone to share life’s back nine with? The movie is terrible partly because it’s badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind. It’s handing out leaflets that don’t say anything. By the time this is all over, it’s unclear whether Luke even knows what it’s all about, and that’s excusing the fact that he also has no idea how his last scene ends.

After one meltdown at a tournament, then another after he crashes his car, he winds up stranded in a little place called Utopia, Texas. The codger turns out to be a former pro named Johnny Crawford, and Johnny knows all. (His initials are the same as a certain religious superstar.) Luke, as the gospel singers in “The Color Purple’’ might say: God is trying to tell you something.