This movie falls flat

Rating: 5/10 (5 November 2000)

While the overall success of this movie cannot be blamed on any of the acting performances or the director, this is a flat, boring movie. it takes far too long to get into the heart of the story, and when you do, it doesn;t really pick up pace like it drastically needed to. My favorite movies happen to be time piece dramas.....it's not like I am an action genre fan. However, this movie is completely limited because of the script and the story line in genearl. It wouldn't matter who played the roles and who directed, the movie would have fallen flat. The biggest problem is that the movie focuses far too much on the overall theme......they try to smack you upside the head with the theme time and time again.....it is forced, and the theme is pretty generic......Worse yet, and most importqantly, the characters have no dperth to them......they are boring and you never quite fully understand where they were in the past to care about them in the present. They try to elude what these characters were like before we get to the present, but they do it in such a shallow fashion, that we never really know any of the characters, nor do we dare about them. Bagger Vacne(Will Smith) is a forced, generic, unnecessary character, just their to swarm us with his annoying logic on life...and we never know where he got this logic from....he is just a mystical chracter who we are not allowed to know anything about. Runnolph Junah(Damon) is scared from his past, and we know so little about that past when he was in war...We know he returns home a different guy then when he left and that he has lost his swing(he was an up and coming golfer legend before he went to war). Now he is home, a drunk, and trying to drink away the memories....He makes the transition from drunk to golfer again literally in the snap of a finger......it is VERY unrealistic. And Charlize Theorn's character, no matter how hot she is, is a waste as well....We never feel like we know enough about her and Damon's past relationship to care what happens with it now...Their romance could be the weakest, unbelievable portion of the filme. There is never a level of excitment or conflict that can make this movie anything but drab. A River Runs Through It is one of my all time favorite movies. In that film, a more boring topic than gold was chosen...that of fly fishing, but you cared about the characters...you felt like you knew them, and because of that, yoiu were drawn to the entire movie....The Legend of bagger Vance comes no where near achieving this. It is one of the biggest disappointments I've seen in a while for I was psyched to see it. It looks pretty on the outside, but it's rotten on the inside...a very shallow, one dimensional drab film.