Good Enough Sports Pic; Good Enough Political Bio-Pic

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2009)

"Invictus" is a good enough sports movie and a good enough political bio-pic, but not more than that. Morgan Freeman is Morgan Freeman. I really need to see him play against type at least once. Maybe a male prostitute or something. Here he does what he always does, lately: play the stately elder who mentors usually white youths. Matt Damon is surprisingly good as a real life rugby player, Francois Pienaar, who, as a google image search quickly reveals, was much larger and more ferocious looking than Damon. Damon's South African accent is good, but, in the end, he's given little to do. The rugby scenes are appropriately inspirational.
The film's weak points are many. There are too many scenes of Nelson Mandela being handed paperwork by his lovely aid, signing the paperwork, and handing it back to his lovely aid. There is no appreciation of the South African landscape, or even Cape Town, one of the most spectacularly situated cities on earth. Nothing new is achieved in the field of filmed sports. If Clint Eastwood wanted to create a film with no memorable, arresting visual images, he certainly did. The film presents the situation in South Africa as black or white, and it's much more complicated than that. For example, Afrikaner settlement in predates Zulu settlement; and majority vote has been followed by very high crime rates, including utterly horrendous rape rates.