Review: Invictus

Invictus is a curious beast – and one of those very rare movies from Clint Eastwood that is less than compelling.

Clearly, the audience knows the outcome going into the movie – so dramatic tension is left wanting. In that case, the film should focus on the tensions between the black and white communities – which unfortunately it completely fails to do.

And of course, that’s classic Clint: he’s well known for not changing scripts, for not demanding or handling his own rewrites – if he likes the script when he reads it, then he shoots it as is. So if there are issues, those issues are in the original script.

Also Clint’s ‘deliver the movie on time, under budget’ method for once lets him down here: many scenes, though all shot by Tom Stern who did such great work for Clint on Changeling and Gran Torino, seem rushed, and shot with available light; there’s greyness to the film.

The script is indecisive about who the main character is: Mandela or Pienaar – neither are fleshed out enough, and thus Morgan Freeman (in a role he was born to play) and a pumped up Matt Damon have little to play with. Nor does the film draw together the successfully the similarities of the two characters: a president not fit (in terms of political experience) to be president, and a rugby captain who was a hair’s breadth from losing his job; a black president having to win over the whites and control his own people, and a rugby captain having to win over the blacks and control his own team.

The socio-political landscape is addressed with nothing more than a sideways glance in the depiction of the black and white security teams working together.

The rugby scenes falter at first, but improve as the film goes on – the crunching tackles become more realistic as the film goes on – suggesting they were shot in sequence.

Internet chatter suggests there are some historical inaccuracies, but these may be down as much to creative licence as to Clint’s penchant for revisionism.

Now all that probably sounds like I didn’t like it, but that wouldn’t be a fair assumption. Freeman’s accent drops now and then, but, as ever, the gravitas he brings to the role enobles Mandela’s surmonising still further. Damon underplays Pienaar nicely. And the film doesn’t bang you over the head with lectures about racism.
Ultimately, it’s just a sports movie.
Score: 6/10