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25I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again.
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50Seven Days in Utopia obviously isn't targeted at us cynical New Yorkers. But it goes down more smoothly than you'd imagine thanks to Duvall and an excellent supporting cast.
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30A stultifying hybrid of athletic instruction film and Christian sermon.
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30For one thing, Seven Days in Utopia feels an awful lot like Victor Salva's 2006 New Age uplifter "Peaceful Warrior." That film at least had the appeal of watching Nick Nolte play Yoda, whereas here Duvall simply seems to be playing Duvall.
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50Until Seven Days in Utopia sucker punches you with a surfeit of faith-based platitudes, its upbeat brand of golf mysticism isn't altogether unappealing.
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12The 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.
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67It's a lot more cornball – i.e., enjoyable – than "The Tree of Life," which tried for some of the same things. Utopia, with its big blue skies and peachy-keen people, may not rank right up there with Shangri-La, but it's close enough.
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25Not a second of it is convincing - or compelling - but then the film is about "utopia," a blandly idealized place unblemished by hardship, malice, sin, or errant golf strokes.
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70Duvall can play an avuncular cowboy sage in his sleep, but there's truly no one on Earth you'd rather see dishing out homespun aphorisms, so it's pointless to resist the pleasure of watching him do what he can do better than anyone else. Baker and Melissa Leo, as the waitress' mom, are not asked to exhibit a fraction of their talent, but they further class the joint up.
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40There's a climactic putt, of course, but by then you wish Duvall would get one more "Tender Mercies" under his belt so you can forget about this tin cup of a family flick.
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50Told in such predictable and bland fashion it dulls the effect. And this in a movie with Robert Duvall, Lucas Black and Melissa Leo.
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50Lacks surprises.
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83In addition to being one of the finest golf movies ever, this film raises the bar on faith-based cinema.
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25Until its final seconds, Seven Days in Utopia is just a piece of gee-whiz, G-rated, nicely shot evangelism outfitted as a golf movie. Then it cuts away at the pivotal moment that's normally the life's blood of inspirational sports dramas - and becomes something vastly more obnoxious.
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38God bless Robert Duvall. An American cinematic institution, our greatest living actor makes the fortune-cookie bromides of Matthew Dean Russell's Seven Days in Utopia sound like Yates.
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Sep 2, 201140Seven Days in Utopia is flawed in so many ways -- the editing, writing, acting and Matthew Dean Russell's direction are uniformly weak -- that this well-intentioned film does its positive messages a disservice.
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Sep 1, 201160Though the drama has its heartfelt moments, it unrolls as flat as the Texas terrain, cast in an idyllic summer glow.
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Sep 1, 201150With all due respect to Cook's novel, another book - the Bible - teaches us that on the seventh day, God gave it a rest. Seven Days in Utopia should have followed His lead.
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Sep 1, 201140If the combination of Christian bromides and golf tips strikes you as a recipe for boredom, stay away.
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Aug 30, 201120Director Matt Russell shamelessly pitches woo to the already converted with an unholy barrage of heavy-handed flashbacks and phony Christian uplift. If any film ever needed a mulligan….
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Aug 30, 201150For 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.
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Aug 30, 201160Provides little more than a pleasantly passable Christian sports parable delivered as a sort of Texan golfer's version of "The Karate Kid."
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Aug 30, 201130A squishy Hallmark Channel-level melodrama that rarely bothers to mask its propagandistic intentions.