A Course Called Ireland review – why did Bill Murray ever agree to this Irish golf show?

The Hollywood star is so grumpy in this new travelogue it’s like he wishes he wasn’t there. Think sulky car journeys, strained encounters and the sense of a TV series imploding

A Course Called Ireland is a new documentary in which Bill Murray golfs his way around the “Emerald Isle” while reflecting on everything from his great-grandmother to worms. The heart leaps. Bill Murray? The same Bill Murray whose genius for wounded obnoxiousness was so beautifully deployed in Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation? Yes, the same Bill Murray.

A montage of coming attractions does little to dampen the ardour. Here is the 76-year-old actor teeing off amid the gasp-inducing greenery of County Kerry. Here he is squinting at the “hardworking Irish worms” that stripe the fairways of coastal Cork. And here he is saying “hah-hah” in a variety of other golf-adjacent locations while surrounded by locals whose body language suggests that they, too, are in the process of saying, or at least thinking, “hah-hah”. We ready our jaws for the cavalcade of bittersweet guffaws that will inevitably follow.

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