Improve Your Golf Game in One Easy Step! God on the Green in Seven Days in Utopia

Details

Seven Days in Utopia
Directed by Matt Russell
Opens September 2

Related Content

• A Long Time Ago, We All Talked Like Yoda
  October 17, 2011
• The Worst Movies Of The Year: My Picks
  December 20, 2011
• Summer Movie Guide 2011
  May 11, 2011
• Tea Party Princess
  January 25, 2012
• Regrets, I've Had a Few: A Hermit's Pre-Death Funeral in Get Low
  July 27, 2010

More About

• Robert Duvall
• Lucas Black
• Yoda
• Seven Days in Utopia
• Matt Russell

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

A fantasy about a temperamental, wand-wielding young man named Luke and the aphorism-uttering master who leads him to enlightenment, Seven Days in Utopia transposes Jedi mythology to the manicured greens of competitive golf. But unlike the Excalibur-on-the-baseball-diamond antics of The Natural, Matt Russell's modern myth trades out hero worship for a hero who worships. After an epic meltdown on the 18th hole of his professional debut, handsome hotshot Luke Chisholm (Lucas Black) swerves his sedan onto the Texas farm of one Johnny Crawford (Robert Duvall), a wizened old Yoda who just happens to be a retired golf pro. With his car wrecked just enough, and a wholesome redhead making eyes at him from across the haystacks, Luke agrees to stick around for a week of eccentric private lessons and golf metaphors. For a time, the film shoulders its hokum rather well, with Black strutting convincingly and Duvall's mouthy mugging mostly in check. But all those shots of heavenly shafts of light eventually climax in unabashed Christian conversion, with our Golf Whisperer bequeathing Luke a Bible as a power-pop song exults, it feels like I'm born again. "See it, feel it, trust it," Johnny teaches. "Don't think." God forbid.