Seven Days in Utopia (**1/4)

I’m always suspicious of titles wherein one of the words is both the name of something and also means something else. Utopia is the name of the tiny Texas town where frustrated golfer Luke (Lucas Black) finds himself after blowing the chance to win his first big tournament, crashing his car, and tossing his cell phone in frustration. That’s another thing I’m suspicious of. Who besides characters in movies like Wild Hogs intentionally chucks a cell phone? Anyway, first person that lucky Luke runs into is also a once-promising golfer (Robert Duvall, Black’s Get Low costar) who just so happens to have settled in this town of under 400. Not quite the second person he meets is the waitress at the improbably bustling local diner, who appears to be the only pre-menopausal woman in town. (Melissa Leo plays one on the other side of that divide.) She’s got an obnoxious quasi-boyfriend, but by about the third day, she saying things to Luke like, “Sometimes I think you might be hopeless.” Seriously, who thinks anything “sometimes” about a person she met two days ago?

It’s nearly the same setup as comedies like Doc Hollywood or the animated Cars, only it plays out like the Karate Kid, if the hero had been a little older, his crush object prayed a bit more, and Mr. Miyagi was an old white guy who taught sport by making his student paint pictures instead of fences. And, inside of a week…well, nothing surprising happens. Duvall, playing basically the only interesting character, comes close to rescuing the movie. When he tells Luke about having “a purpose and calling that went beyond any scorecard,” it only sounds a little corny. Mainly though, the movie suffers from blandness. Even the fish-out-of-water element is pretty mild. Luke’s neither a big-city slicker—he’s from nearby Waco—nor an egotistical big shot. You’d think there’d be more humor given the title and the premise, but about the only funny thing in the movie is the name of Luke’s golfing nemesis, a Korean (or maybe Korean-American—he never speaks) called T. K. Oh.

Those with a taste for a certain sort of old-fashioned wholesomeness (the movie’s rated G and extols faith) may enjoy this, but they’ll likely forget it in about seven days.

IMDB link

viewed 8/29/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/6/11