The “dreadful” movie Roger Ebert said he would rather eat a golf ball than watch again
There are a thousand different ways to say you didn’t like a movie, and Roger Ebert claiming that he’d gladly wolf down a golf ball than watch a terrible film twice is certainly one of the most interesting.
The critic had a way with words, which was the bare minimum considering what he did for a living, obviously, and he used them to eviscerate hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures that he hated. However, only one of them involved the hypothetical munching of a synthetic rubber sphere.
To be fair, it was at least on-brand, since the feature in question was, in fact, a golf movie. Not just any golf movie, though, but a Christian golf movie, which is apparently a thing. Maybe not a thing, but it happened once, which was more than enough to convince Ebert the genre should end then and there.
How does cinema evolve to the point where it makes golf-specific motion pictures with a religious angle? Well, it takes one book, four screenwriters for some reason, and one Academy Award-winning legend of the silver screen slumming it in a role that infuriated Ebert every bit as much as the rest of the movie.
Adapted from David L Cook’s Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia, the title was at least mercifully shortened to Seven Days in Utopia when director Matt Russell made his move. Lucas Black’s Luke Chisholm loses his shit during a tournament, crashes his car, and finds himself stuck in the titular town, where Robert Duvall’s wizened sage appears to offer words of wisdom.
Not only does he find a renewed vigour for life and the sport he calls home, young Luke also seeks to reconcile his lingering daddy issues, enters a local Texas tournament, and ends up going head-to-head with the greatest golfer in the world, with actual golfer KJ Choi playing a fictional golfer called TK Oh. No, really, that’s the character’s name.
“I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again,” Ebert began his one-star review. “It tells the dreadful parable of a pro golfer who was abused by his dad, melts down in the Texas Open, and stumbles into the clutches of an insufferable geezer in the town of Utopia (pop. 375), who promises him that after seven days in Utopia, he will be playing great golf. He will also find Jesus, but for that, you don’t have to play golf, although it might help.”
As you might have guessed, that geezer is Duvall’s Johnny Crawford, and Ebert was befuddled. “Only a great actor could give such a bad performance,” he noted, summarising the part as “a flim-flam man who embodies all the worst qualities of the Personal Motivation Movement.” Remarkably, things managed to get worse after Seven Days in Utopia ended.
The film ends ambiguously, with viewers never finding out if Luke sank the tourney-winning putt, unless… they visited a now-defunct URL genuinely called didhemaketheputt.com, where it was explained via a reading from the follow-up book, along with various religious and faith-based odds and sods, which is a ridiculous way to tie up a movie’s narrative. Presumably, Ebert did not visit the site.
