D+

Golf is served up with a hearty dose of corn, as well as religion, in this curious hybrid adapted by writer-director Matthew Dean Russell, David L. Cook and a couple of other scribes from Cook’s novel “Golf’s Sacred Journey.” Despite the fact that it’s set in Utopia, Texas, the resultant mishmash is no paradise. It’s as heavy-handed and sanctimonious as any of those “family” features WalMart has taken to sponsoring on NBC Friday nights—but at least those are free. This one you have to pay for, presumably because it boasts the star wattage of Robert Duvall.

Oddly enough, the movie “Seven Days” most resembles is “Cars.” Instead of a hot-shot animated racing car that finds itself stranded in a tiny burg where it’s mentored by a wise old veteran, the young whippersnapper here is Luke Chisholm (Lucas Black), a kid who’s just choked on the last hole of an important amateur tournament, taking eighteen strokes before breaking his putter in disgust. The meltdown, captured on national TV and regularly replayed, ended with his father (Joseph Lyle-Taylor), who’s pushed the lad mercilessly to succeed, walking off the links in disgust. No wonder Luke drives off mad and, in his fury, crashes through a fence beside a Texas cornfield while trying to avoid colliding with a cow that’s ambled out onto the two-lane road. Luckily he’s aided by Johnny Crawford (Duvall), who takes him in and introduces him around town while his car’s being repaired.

Crawford also undertakes to help Chisholm improve his game over his weeklong stay. It turns out that the likable old duffer is a retired pro with an almost zen-like attitude toward golf, though it turns out that the spirit is fundamentalist Christianity rather than eastern meditation. After teaching the lad to patiently “see” and “feel” his shot by having him engage in activities like fly-fishing, painting and piloting, Johnny encourages him to “trust” in the power that will allow him to actually complete it. Especially when Luke puts the “SFT” advice to use in the last reel, when he joins his first pro tournament as a result of Crawford’s influence, it feel like an earthbound version of the final Death Star assault in “Star Wars,” except that Johnny just stands by silently grinning instead of intoning, as the spirit of Obi-Wan did, “Trust the force, Luke.”

And what is the power that Crawford is selling and Luke’s feeling? Apparently, from the church scenes and biblical references on display periodically in the picture, it’s divine providence—putting oneself in God’s hands. That’s a pretty orthodox notion, but employing it in the context of a sports contest seems pretty crude. It is really appropriate to think in terms of God making that free-throw or bowling that strike? And what’s the significance of Crawford giving Luke a face-on putter that will distinguish him from the other players (and that he’ll know “when to use”? Does it signify his “election” at being “born again”? The problem with “Seven Days in Utopia” is that it seems to take a standard-issue sort of sports story and then ladles on a Christian overlay that comes across as arbitrary and unnecessary. But in the end the movie chooses cutely to diverge from the traditional triumphal close in a cutesy fashion that a viewer might find either refreshing or, more likely, frustrating.

There are obligatory subplots to the picture, of course. One involves Crawford’s predictable past (alcoholism, loss of his wife, failure to have children)—that Duvall almost convinces you isn’t utter cliché. Another is Chisholm’s rapprochement with his chastened father. A third concerns the lad’s brief dalliance with local Utopia lass Sarah (Deborah Ann Woll) and the instant animosity between him and a young cowboy (Brian Geraghty). Cameos allow for the presence of Melissa Leo as Sarah’s mother, still grieving the death of her husband, and Kathy Baker as Crawford’s humorous dictatorial housekeeper. But all of the addenda seem completely borrowed from the playbooks of earlier movies, and the drab dialogue certainly doesn’t help. (When, in the final tournament, one of the TV commentators—a stiff young woman—remarks, “You really couldn’t script it any better than this,” you might have to stifle a laugh.)

Neither does Russell’s flaccid direction. He (and editor Robert Komatsu) have a tendency to hold shots a fraction too long, resulting in the cinematic equivalent of dead air, and they err in periodically inserting frantic black-and-white flashback montages that feel utterly out of place. The performances suffer markedly from the miscalculations. Duvall, Leo and Black get by on their sheer professionalism, of course, but Woll, Geraghty and Taylor are left with the deer-in-the-headlights look of sheer amateurs. From the acting perspective, though, the chief problem is Black, whose range extends from A to about A- and leaves an emotional black hole at the center of the movie that sucks out any concern one might have felt for the character. He’s listed among the twelve apostle-like executive producers (in addition to two regular producers and two co-producers!), so perhaps he was just too involved in the behind-the-camera work to give much thought to giving a real performance. The technical side of the film isn’t bad, and the climactic tournament action—which features some real-life pros like K.J. Choi—is reasonably well staged (though explanatory TV commentary is as hackneyed as the real thing). But many will find the outcome a cheat.

Except for audiences that will buy into its implicitly providential theology, “Seven Days in Utopia” is likely to feel as ponderous and dull as any televised golf match does to somebody uninterested in the game. And by contrast, less religiously-inclined golf fans might be put off by its Christian message. So while church groups a certain stripe may embrace it, the advice from this quarter isn’t “See it, feel it, trust it,” but “Skip it.”