Redford ripping-off Redford

Rating: 3/10 (10 February 2006)

It may be a different movie, but we've seen this all before in a better package called A River Runs Through It. We see the same lavish, dreamy photography heavy with panoramic vistas and rosy figures in the setting sun. The nostalgia of preppy characters, a story line that spans the life of a boy-into-old man character and most unforgivable, this time, the golf swing elevated to the spiritual vehicle instead of fly fishing. Didn't anyone think we would notice? It's one thing to produce more than one study of a concept, like the dysfunctional family. The fact the director had such wonderful success with Ordinary People (1980) took nothing away from his presentation of Norman Maclean's novella, which he handled brilliantly 12 years later. But Bagger comes off looking like a parody of what has been done before, and it's a total bogey on this hole.