Lazy writing and poor execution waste a chance to make a great movie.
Clint Eastwood directs and Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon star in this part Nelson Mandela biopic and part underdog sports movie. The movie has three storylines. One is Nelson Mandela’s early decision to keep the colors and symbols of the Springbok rugby team, an almost sacred institution to the white Afrikaners of South Africa and symbol of oppression to the black population. The second deals with Mandela’s security guard, both white and black, and their attempts to get along. The third is the rugby team’s underdog triumph at the 1995 World Cup. The first storyline is well done and inspiring as it should be. The second and third are woefully under-researched, lazily written, and poorly executed. If the 1995 World Cup Championship were a good rugby game you wouldn’t know it from watching this movie. I still don’t even know how rugby is played.
Morgan Freeman is perhaps the only actor in the business that could play Nelson Mandela in a movie. If I saw any other actor playing the part I would be like, “Why couldn’t they get Morgan Freeman?” He nails the gravitas, the patience, and the greatness of the man. Man, Morgan Freeman could read the ingredients off a can of tuna and it would sound profound. Having him preach reconciliation and forgiveness and recite inspirational poetry is something to behold. These are the best parts of the movie. (It’s also cool that the movie actually shot in the prison Mandela was for twenty-seven years during the reign of apartheid.) It’s a shame that the rest of the movie couldn’t have been better. If there is another movie about Mandela, Freeman probably won’t play the part.
Apart from Freeman’s performance, the movie is very disappointing. Take the security detail story for instance. There is a tiff at first between the guards because some are black and some are white and they don’t trust each other. But over time they get along. There really isn’t more to it than that. Mandela was never shot at nor was there any scandal in real life or in this movie. This in itself is not bad, but the movie also declines to make any of the guards anything more than one-dimensional characters. They basically make snide remarks at each other for a while and then stop doing so. There is no drama here. The climax to this storyline wasn’t character based or even plot based. It was a false alarm at the rugby championship. A red herring. Though an empty threat would make sense for this storyline.
The worst part of this movie though is the incredible laziness of the rugby storyline. Rugby is never explained or talked about in a strategic sense (even though most people in the USA would not be familiar with the game), none of the athletes on the team are introduced as characters besides the coach Francois (Matt Damon), and the contests are not shot in a way that tells the story of the game itself. In fact, I would go so far as to describe the climatic championship game as B-Roll: a bunch of disconnected shots that if you rearranged them randomly would lend just as much weight to the story. This is the sort of stuff you have your 2nd crew work on while your real director is doing the important things. You have a huge problem when the most dramatic rugby play in the movie is stock footage of the New Zealand team beating England that the characters watch on their televisions.
I’m not a huge expert on rugby (no thanks to this movie) but I have seen a couple games before. I always got the feeling that it was an incredibly rough, dangerous, badass game. The players are huge and everything is full contact. Does that sound like something you should play an acapella South African tribal chants in the background too? Does that sound like a game that you can win by doing a lot of running through town and visiting historical sites? Would it make sense for the ‘inspirational speech’ of the coach to be but a few sentences with his voice barely raised? I once saw a great documentary called Murderball about wheelchair rugby for cripples. Those rugby players had ten times more balls than this rugby team. I’m sure there were good reasons that South Africa won that year. It seems like it could be an inspiring event that helped unite the country. This movie just does a terrible job at conveying that.
There have been two movies this year that deal with South African apartheid and the reconciliation between the two races. The literal version is Invictus. The metaphorical version was this summer’s science fiction film District 9. District 9 is the better movie and I would suggest it to anyone who would want to see Invictus.
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