Hmm

Rating: 5/10 (6 September 2010)

My wife rented this yesterday and we watched together last night. Our 10 year-old son came into the living room to watch a time or two but the movie didn't hold his attention.
In principle it's a very compelling story (Mandela and the Springboks, writ small as it were). However I felt that the movie wore its morality too strongly and without pause or nuance. The moral dimensions of this story would have been better conveyed if done with more subtlety.
I normally really like Morgan Freeman however as I thought about how he was doing this role I realized that playing Nelson Mandela is very, very hard. Perhaps impossible. The real Nelson Mandela projects a quality that's almost beatific and actually not unlike, say, the Dali Lama. Few human beings possess that quality. A less well-known name that comes to mind is the American monk Thomas Merton.
The 'scare tactic' at the end where we're showed a possibly evil, white face followed by an ensuing 'tension' was abrupt; not organic; and felt like it had been tacked on. And this last remark, now that I've written it, feels tacked on to the preceding part of my review. Still, while I've given it some reflection, I'm not going to greatly belabor the writing of this review.