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.

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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”.

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We ready our jaws for the cavalcade of bittersweet guffaws that will inevitably follow. Continue reading...