The Legend of Bagger Vance Reviews
Top Critic
Another lusciously produced, emotionally clammy Redford enterprise -- forced, phony mythmaking filled with tinged sunsets and full moons.
It offers pleasures of a kind that fewer and fewer films even seem to remember, much less aspire to.
It should be noted that the movie works uncommonly well for what it is; what's aggravating is the lost opportunity.
The film is visually stunning. Its images will stay with you long after their meaning has vanished.
Redford should have spent more time thinking about his characters than about the meaning of it all.
So meticulous in its craftsmanship and so earnest in its storytelling that it feels both physically and spiritually airbrushed.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The competition sequences on the golf links, with the splendid camera work of Michael Ballhaus, and exactly the right amount of digital tweaking, are the real revelations of this film.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Redford is so fascinated with the mythical qualities of the novel's premise ... he doesn't realize how anemic the tale really is.
Supernatural is not much better than subhuman: Hollywood is still, in the year 2000, disinclined to let black actors play human beings.
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| Original Score: 0.5/5
Relies on a ritualized filmmaking style that leaches [Redford's] story of excitement.
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| Original Score: C+
Unabashedly good-natured and unapologetically larger than life, and Will Smith may be the perfect choice to play a character too good to be true.
It's so utterly vague and mystical -- or, to be unkind about it, so slow the movie itself seems to be suffering from a hardening of the arteries.
The film's metaphorical message feels silly and pretentious, partly because every character is a stereotype, but particularly because it can't transcend its heroic tone.
For all the wood-paneled Southern opulence, manicured fairways, and glowingly golden sunsets on display, there's nary a whiff of anything that will stick to your ribs.
| Original Score: 48/100
A soothing, attractive film to watch.
[Redford] turns a solitary, often romanticized sport into a shimmering life metaphor.
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| Original Score: B
Though it's sweet and likable to a fault, it's also a movie that never seems heartfelt or deep.
Most of the racial issues inherent in the setup of Bagger Vance are so painstakingly submerged that they barely register.
Leaves an impression like dew on a fairway: pretty to look at, and very quickly gone.
The real contest for audiences is weathering the tonal shifts and forgiving the screenplay's shallow depths and weak undercurrents.
A movie that speaks well and truly to essentials in the kind of unhurried terms that most modern movies don't even dare to espouse.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It handles a sports movie the way Billie Holiday handled a trashy song, by finding the love and pain beneath the story.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The men and women inhabiting this motion pictures are types, ciphers, and mouthpieces for slogans, not individuals we can believe in and care for.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Much of what happens, regardless of whether its supposed to be touched by magic, seems patently phony.
A knuckleheaded period piece anachronistically strewn with New Age platitudes.
The principal characters, forced in the bright light of the fairway to work not just as allegory but as viable, identifiable human beings, become ludicrous.
Why ... would someone of Redford's proven abilities waste his time on something this frivolous, this negligible -- this out of touch?
It's a feel-nothing movie, too calculated and cautious to locate anything that might resemble a genuine or spontaneous life moment.
