: The Legend of Bagger Vance
Director: Robert Redford
This is the story of an early twentieth Century golf match between an unknown local kid and legendary golfers Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen. The kid (Matt Damon) is caddied by a black guy named Bagger Vance (Will Smith), who helps him overcome his fears after a bad experience in the war. The whole thing is rather pedestrian and predictable. I didn’t buy Damon’s psychic war wounds, and Smith talked like a Chinese riddle saying ordinary things that are supposedly profound similar to “wherever you go, there you are.” I guess the faux-mystic stuff was supposed to be believable and moving — on the DVD extras Redford seemed to buy into it — but I thought it was corny and predictable. Visually the film’s period look was interesting and I liked the way Redford showed certain special golf effects to go along with the mystic theme, but in most cases the golf itself was extremely lame: all we got to see was the players swinging followed by a close-up of the ball landing next to the cup (that’s as bad as a sitcom’s presentation of golf). The film was also way too long. But I loved the narrator, Jack Lemmon, who was a modern-day old geezer telling about the tournament he witnessed as a child. Not a terrible film, but a little boring, too predictable, mystically corny, and doesn’t hold up over its length.
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