Outstanding Film, High Standard entertainment, Clint Scores a try Here!

Rating: 9/10 (30 December 2009)

this for me is clint eastwoods best ever film as director. this film is a real winner, great performance by Morgan Freeman as mandela and indeed by matt Damon as Francois Pinaar the South African Rugby captain. This is a classier version of another sporting movie I saw a year or so ago (Goal II) which deserved something but got nothing. There is so much about this film that you will enjoy and you don't have to be a Rugby fan to enjoy it (or to understand the rules of Rugby because they are explained for you (and mandela) briefly in the movie.
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
I have seen this movie shortly after seeing (End Game) (about how mandela was catapulted into power)and The Blind Side (which has nothing to do with this movie at all except it deals with blacks and whites in sport and has a sporting theme re American football).
The PLAYERS trip to mandelas cell on the eve of the big match and the plane flying over the stadium are great moments and even the little quieter moments of the coloured maid in the Pinaar family household was dramatic and well handled.
There was nothing bad in this movie, lots of predictability but those who knew the result of the 1995 Final wont be in any way disappointed. We all love Lomu, even the English. The mixing of the real and alternative action smacked of Goal II, hence my reference to that and Eastwood must have got his ideas from that film to use the filming and the commentaries etc.
I lost the film a bit on the new South African anthem which the players rejected to sing and I certainly would have liked to have seen scenes of how patriotic the players really were in the build up to the matches, especially the final. what we saw and focused on was mandela greeting the players.
Clearly, as mandela was used in 'End Game', mandela himself was using the World Cup and Pinaar as a political vehicle to unite his country and sport. If there was a weakness, it was that pinaars character was not researched enough and was too shallow and perhaps Freeman overplayed the Mandela intentions, but the film works and it is a wonderful film to watch, even when the credits are coming up, stay till the very end because the very end is as important as the beginning.