A Solid Yet Unbearably Slow Drama

Rating: 7/10 (17 November 2016)

Sports are not my thing I've never been into them and find them boring, yet when I first heard about this movie I was extremely curious to seem if I could get over that an s for the most part I did I found this to be a very good film despite some major pacing issues. But by far the best thing about this movie are the performances from Damon and Freeman who both deservedly earned Oscar nominations for this movie, Morgan Freeman was so good in this movie not only was his accent extremely convincing but he also nailed the emotional turmoil that Mandela was going through your able to get completely behind him and Freemans performance was just overall inspiring. Matt Damon gives one of the greatest performances of his entire career in this film, he has a great parallel to Freeman and you get a sense of the similarities between them, Damon was great in the rugby scenes and also great and conveying how desperately he wanted to lead his team to victory and said like Freeman you were very easily able to get behind him. I never thought I could feel such intensity from a rugby match by my god I was on edge during every second of them because they take their time to build up the importance of winning this match and makes it all the more satisfying to watch. The relationships between the South Africans in this movie was a pleasure to watch it was done perfectly you understood all that these two peoples had been through and watching them gradually come to trust each other was fascinating and satisfying. However there are some flaws with this film and it's mainly the excruciatingly slow pace it works for the rugby scenes but outside that it's just makes scenes drag in majorly and it did bore me at time and make me just want them to get back to the rugby. This film also does lack some subtlety characters just seem to immediately say what their thinking instead of conveying it through a performance despite the fact that they could have used some of the dragged out scenes to build up some more investment.
Invictus is far from a perfect movie but it has very good intentions, this film has two excellent performances from Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, well directed rugby scenes, a great political and racial story and some truly inspiring scenes.
78%/B+