Director: John-Paul Davidson. Starring: José Luis Gutiérrez, José Navar, Maria Molins. PG cert. Running time: 124 min.
Severiano Ballesteros was one of the least boring golfers in the history of his sport, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from watching Seve, a documentary/biopic hybrid which aims to do for him what Senna did for the F1 champ. This life story is the stuff of myth: he was just some kid in a Spanish fishing village, whose first efforts to learn golf involved knocking stones around on the beach using the head of a 3-iron twined to a branch.
As Seve began to crack the privileged domain of local clubs, we move back and forth between his dazzling apprenticeship (acted) and professional heyday (archive footage). The film’s structured to double down on all his setbacks and triumphs – you may lose count of the number of times young Seve chips the ball out of a bunker to get within inches of the hole, only for his older self to repeat the feat identically.
A more imaginative film would milk this temporal shuffling for artistic contrast, rather than making it just an incessant foretelling of future glories. Dragging its feet through the rough, the young Seve stuff here is especially boring. It’s partly because director John-Paul Davidson, a veteran of Michael Palin’s BBC travelogues, has such a ham-handed touch with his novice performers: there are many dim shots of Seve’s quartet of model-handsome brothers shooting worried glances at each other as he tees off. These sequences just become a blur of bad knitwear and light trumpet solos.
What remains is the story of a stubborn talent and a foreshortened life, of a titan brought low. But the workaday treatment of his career feels excerpted, chunk by chunk, from filler documentaries you might get when rain stops play during the Ryder Cup. “Ay caramba! And… other Spanish cries,” we hear from gravelly clubhouse pundit Peter Alliss, doing his best to confirm one’s suspicions: it’s the kind of sports biopic Alan Partridge would mastermind.
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