Star Rating:

Seve: The Movie

Director: John-Paul Davidson

Actors: Jose Luis Gutierrez, Jose Navar, Maria Molins

Release Date: Saturday 30th November 2013

Running time: Spain minutes

“Legends are born to win” the poster for this docu-drama biopic confusingly tells us, and it is a fitting line for the movie in general; all too pompous and not exactly interested in making too much sense. Not that the accomplishments of Severiano Ballesteros aren’t worthy of documenting, but he definitely deserved a better movie than this.

One part documentary, one part dramatized recreations of Seve’s youth, we jump back and forth between the beginning of his golf career with actual footage and voice-over interviews with some of the people who knew him and watched him play back in the day, and then Seve as a young teenager, obsessed with golf and living in humble surroundings with his loving family.

It seems as if director John-Paul Davidson knew that there simply wasn’t enough footage to work with to create a Senna-alike documentary, which is a real shame, as he may have been better off simply making a short doc instead of fleshing out Seve’s backstory with some of the most trite and saccharine scenes you could imagine. The young Seve (played by Jose Luis Gutierrez) is too often shown as a contrary little shit who refuses to do anything unless it ultimately involves him playing more golf. His family are shown constantly laughing even as they face what must be constant economic turmoil, as they gift Seve with different parts of a golf-club, unable to afford to buy him a whole one.

The movie doesn’t even bother to give us a reason as to why Seve was so interested in golf in the first place, and the poorly scripted scenes and universally bad acting don’t help much either. It’s only during the actual documentary scenes does the film do what it should have been doing all along, and get us interested in watching a great man do what he does best. Davidson handles these sections well, as his experience at directing TV documentaries with the likes of Stephen Fry and Michael Palin is put to good use, but there are simply not enough of them throughout.

Dragged out to over two hours, Seve The Movie still manages to short change a legend of the game.