'Invictus' Movie Review

The moment I saw the previews for “Invictus”, I knew I wanted to see this movie. Presented by a troika of oscar-winners – Morgan Freeman as Wilson Mandela, Matt Damon as the captain of South Africa’s rugby team, Clint Eastwood as producer and director – and based on Mandela’s use of sports to unite post-apartheid South Africa, it looked like a sure winner. Unfortunately, I was wrong. This film never acquires a focus, never really touches the heart, and simply leaves the viewer wondering if it will be over in time to run those last few errands before heading home to dinner. Everybody tries really, really hard. If Freeman had any more gravitas, they’d need an overhead crane to move him around the set, but the script makes it seem that after 27 years in prison and taking the helm of a bitterly divided nation on the brink of civil war, Mandela devoted most of his presidential attention to sports. Damon bulked up physically to be believable as a professional athlete in the brutal sport, and works his mouth around an Afrikaaner accent, but is never given an opportunity to demonstrate why he is the team captain in the first place, let alone how he can inspire his teammates to capture the World Cup. There’s a subplot involving Mandela’s security personnel and the conflict between the black bodyguards who saw him through the campaign and victory, and the white bodyguards Mandela assigned to the squad to demonstrate his commitment to the “rainbow nation”, but it doesn’t really go anywhere either. There’s a bit of testosterone-driven head-butting and lots of discussion about how to protect Mandela from the threat of assassination, but it never really delivers on that premise, either. One scene that should have been glorious is thrown away, when a smarmy sportscaster, who has denigrated the team throughout its drive to world championship, asks Damon how it feels to have won for “60,000 South Africans” -- presumably the number of people in the stadium, but that’s never really made clear. And Damon’s character, in what should have been a one-small-step-for-a-man moment, says, “I didn’t win it for 60,000 South Africans – I won it for twelve million South Africans”. But without an appropriate build-up to enhance the audience's understanding of the significance of that statement, there’s no punch behind it. Which brings us to the film’s other major flaw – it simply doesn’t translate. Most Americans don’t understand rugby, won’t recognize the signs or slogans being used by the fans, and will never really quite catch on to how a team that once represented apartheid is supposed to now personify a united South Africa.

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