One of Clint's weakest films from the past decade

Rating: Null/10 (3 March 2010)

This could have been a great film, in the same line of quality of Clint's previous ones Changeling and Gran Torino (yes, I know many don't consider Gran Torino a great film but I just loved that film). It is a period piece about Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman delivers as Mandela) and his peculiar relation, as the president of South Africa, with the sport of the minority, the rugby. I trust in a filmmaker like Eastwood and indeed I think the problem of Invictus is not related with the thing that it is a period piece: the research was made (in this case, the film was based on John Carlin's Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation), I mean, the historical inaccuracies reported are, at least for my money, not quite important ("Johan de Villiers the TV commentator who first bad-mouths the Boks and then praises the Springboks, after the final whistle, asks the question of Pienaar: "What did it feel like to have 62,000 fans supporting you in the stadium?" and receives the answer: "We didn't have 62,000 fans behind us, we had 43 million South Africans." It was in fact a SABC reporter called David van der Sandt").
So in Invictus we see facts and certainly for people who didn't much about Mandela and the game that changed a nation, people like me, it is a pretty useful film. But anyway, you don't need to be a hundred percent faithful with the facts to create a masterpiece. That said, Invictus was nothing less than a true disappointment, with many weak elements.