Seven Days in Utopia is a bizarrely bad film, a sort of contemporary golf western based on a self-help book. Starring Lucas Black and Robert Duvall (with Melissa Leo and pro golfer K. J. Choi), it’s the story of Luke Chisholm (Black), a young golfer with an overbearing father. He’s just blown his first big game when, speeding angrily down a Texas highway, he comes across a town called Utopia, where Johnny Crawford (Duvall) rides horses and doles out wisdom. Johnny, himself a former golfer, asks Luke to give him one week and he’ll fix Luke’s game.

Johnny proceeds to teach Luke about golf through journal writing, fly-fishing, painting (“All golf shots start with a blank canvas”), flying a small airplane (Johnny heartwarmingly turns the engine off so Luke can save the day and build confidence!), and throwing washers into a cup. Luke catches fireflies in a jar with redheaded diner waitress Sarah (Deborah Ann Woll, the vampire Jessica from True Blood) and clashes with a hotheaded young cowboy (“Let’s settle this with a little ol’ game o’ cowboy poker after the rodeo tonight”).

There are only three surprises: First, it is impressive to fit this many clichés into one not especially long movie. Second, how did they get Robert Duvall to sign up for this?! And last, although we do get plenty of hints (the movie opens with a Bible verse), the big reveal at the end is that (spoiler alert!) God is way more important than golf. All the Mr. Miyagi–style lessons have the secret agenda of teaching Luke to read the Bible, go to church, and stop caring so much about sports. It’s so bad, so spectacularly treacly and heavy-handed, that it almost comes back around to good (or at least funny)—but not quite. recommended

6 replies on “<i>Seven Days in Utopia</i>: One Hundred Years of Clichés”

  3. Wow, you missed the whole point of the movie – not a golfer? Or, not a christian? Either way, this movie was amazing. I think maybe your heart was in a “bizarrely bad” place that day. Movies shouldn’t be about budgets and special effects; they should be about making you feel something.

  4. Anna you clearly have issues with good family movies. You have been taken and brainwashed by todays films that are measured and given an approval only if it has nudity, bad language and an anti religion message. This world which we live in is upside down. Black is white, good is bad and Seven Days in Utopia is a bad movie…not!

  5. It was a great Movie!! Anna Minard has something stuck up her back side and cant just relax and enjoy a great, wholesome Texas movie. By the way Robert Duvall doesn’t do anything he doesn’t believe in..

  6. Goodness, nothing like a personal opinion to get the Stranger’s Christian readership crawling out of the woodworks, I guess. As a former Christian, I can… actually not really understand that at all, given the circumstances. The movie sounds horrible. So in the end, he’s convinced to give up golfing… to go to church. He can’t have both? That’s an almost aggressive level of idiocy. He would have to be trying, actively trying to look for an excuse NOT to golf, if he were serious about golfing in the first place. Even when I was a Christian, I didn’t think I was believing in God IN PLACE of anything else, it wasn’t like “Gee, I’d love to go get my shit together, but I’m afraid I have church today!”

    Christians, are you serious? Are you really defending a movie that suggests that God must come at the cost of the sport you love? Get it together.

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