Review: Invictus

Director Clint Eastwood is known for crafting moving and poignant films, but he also has a history of films which fail to stand out and are a general disappointment. Unfortunately for this viewer, Invictus falls into the latter category. It is a movie that aspires to recreate an amazing moment in history, but the story lacks direction and struggles with its identity. Invictus is the story of the South African rugby team, which against all odds won the 1995 Rugby World Cup as the host nation. However, it is also about Nelson Mandela, a great man, who was at the time newly elected as the first black president of South Africa, and was faced with the task of leading a severely divided, post-apartheid nation. And therein lays the problem. Is this a movie about Mandela, or a movie about a rugby team? It attempts to bring the two of them together, but the result is a film that lacks purpose or impact.

Morgan Freeman is of course fantastic as Mandela, and I can think of no one else who could have played him. But the end result turns out to be exactly what you would expect. We’ve seen Freeman play kind, wise gentlemen in the past, the only difference here was his need to learn the accent and peculiar way of speech that Mandela possesses. Matt Damon is passable in his role as Francois Pienaar, the captain of the rugby team (Providing you can suspend your disbelief for a bit. Damon is 5’7” or 8” tops, while the actual Pienaar was 6’3” and stood like a mountain on the rugby field.), but the rugby scenes themselves are an absolute bore to watch. The match scenes lack any sort of energy, and the final game is about 15-20 minutes of poor angles, close-ups, and slow motion, all of which fail to give you any sense of what a rugby match is really like. Not only that, but there is little explanation of the action beyond the occasional glimpse at a scoreboard, so it becomes tough at times to even know what’s going on. And I’m one of a small percentage of Americans who actually know the rules to the sport. I can’t imagine what the match scenes were like for someone who doesn’t know a scrum from a try.

In the end, I think I would have enjoyed this film much more if it were a movie solely about the life and person of Mandela. I probably would have also preferred if it were more focused towards the rugby team, as we don’t get to know anything about any of the other players on the team. (What about the lone black player? We don’t hear anything about him in this movie, and that’s a shame.) However, with this film attempting to juxtapose these two subjects, what we are left with is a movie that tries to inspire, but lacks any sort of inspiration beyond the character of Mandela, which often speaks for itself.

Final Grade: C+