INVICTUS reviews are in...

By Matt Holmes / July 1, 2011

I didn't expect this. Every review I've read for Clint Eastwood' Nelson Mandela movieInvictus,barring one, has bored me to the point of nearly throwing in the towel. Well almost, kind of, nearly. Don't start with the negative responses. Please hold your tongue and don't call me a lame 15 year-old-journalist/blogger or complain about how good this site used to be in the good old days. I'm just saying, the reviews are in and they don't quite live up to the Eastwood/Freeman/Damon/Mandela/December Oscar knockout we were expecting.

Invictus is on limited U.S. release from Dec. 11th, and doesn't play in the U.K. till Feb. 5th. It's just from the sounds of things, it's the un-sutble Eastwood again and whose prints are more obvious than they used to be. I didn't hate Gran Torino but I didn't like some aspects of how Eastwood shot it, and of course that awful ending. Flags of Our Fathers or Million Dollar Baby were ok but there was a straight forwardness to his direction, and an unsubtly about them that I couldn't agree with, or digest properly. The bizarre thing about this whole situation is that the handful of all the reviews posted so far are positive, at least in the Rotten Tomatoes sense of the word, it's just they are written in such a formulaic, by the numbers, deflated manner, where most of the meat and bones time is taken up concerning the film's plot, or the historical significance of the story. That really doesn't bode well for the actual picture itself. Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, captain of the South African World Cup Rugby Team of 1994. Todd McCarthy begins his review with the most ludicrous not going out on a limb opening line I've ever read... €œInvictus is a very good story very well told.€ Well we know it's a good story, we are well aware of the history but "well told?" Is that as good as a pan for an Eastwood movie?

€œInspirational on the face of it, Clint Eastwood€™s film has a predictable trajectory, but every scene brims with surprising details that accumulate into a rich fabric of history, cultural impressions and emotion.€ €

And with that McCarthy, whose reviews I always look forward to and trust, just kills it there. Is he telling me there's nothing to see here except a plain re-telling of history? I expect more from my Eastwood.

Kirk Honeycutt at The Hollywood Reporter's bottom line calls it "A temperate, evenhanded perhaps overly timid film about an intemperate time in South Africa". Yikes! This, along with Nine (likewise but for other reasons), was always seen as the top Best Picture Oscar contender because of it's pedigree, both in terms of historical significance and cast, gets a bottom line like that? Isn't the Best Picture contender a movie to shout to the rafters about, the way critics did for The Hurt Locker, Up in The Air and Up. Invictus doesn't stand a chance outside of a throw-a-way nomination at this point. He goes on...

The film, based upon the book "Playing the Enemy" by John Carlin, has an understandably narrow focus of 1995 South Africa. Mandela is seen only in the context of a sudden rugby convert. He signs papers and greets international delegations between matches. Francois is glimpsed with a family and wife --or girlfriend, even this is unclear -- but he exists solely to play his sport. The film enters neither of their lives. It's a film about a nation's psyche, not its individuals. Where you would love a vigorous portrayal of two larger-than-life personalities, the film tiptoes through polite scenes where everyone speaks and acts with political correctness. Likewise, the actors stick close to the surface. Freeman gives you a folksy yet sagacious leader. He ambles rather than walks and peers at people with sly wisdom gleaming in his eyes. He doesn't try to plumb the depths of a one-time rebel or a man struggling to keep both his nation and family together.... ...Damon has taken the flabby dough-boy body from "The Informant!" and chiseled it into pure muscle. He looks like a rugby player. What he thinks about apartheid or Mandela or anything else you never learn. He certainly respects the nation's president but their relationship is largely ceremonial.

Jeff Wells' review at Hollywood Elsewhere is by far the best written, most enjoyable review on the web and I would encourage all of you guys to read it. He particularly pays attention to Morgan Freeman, and predicts the Best Actor statue is his...

Freeman's performance is not a deep-mine thing or a dazzling revisiting of a still living-legend whose face and manner are well remembered by millions. But it's really quite satisfying -- soothing -- to watch Freeman, nearly a dead ringer, adopt a slight accent and step into Mandela's shoes and walk around with a slight stoop and a faint grin and radiate that serene wise-man thing. There's no question Freeman will end up as one of the five Best Actor nominees, and I'm betting right now that he'll win.

On the movie itself...

Invictus does remind us of what a centered and wise and very cool guy Mandela was -- it gives off a contact high in this respect. But it's all exposition, exposition, exposition and more exposition. And there's almost no "story" in the sense that there are no character turns, no twists, no nothing in the way of surprises or intensifications. A good amount of it -- most of it, really -- is about South African government employees watching rugby games or standing around offices or sitting on buses or in the backs of cars or watching TV. (TV screens get a major workout in this film.) Or about athletes jogging and playing rugby and working out. Invictus is about an "important" subject -- one we should think about and perhaps learn from -- but it mainly just ambles along. It kinda gets off the ground at the end, but rousing sports-movie finales don't travel like they used to because we've seen them so damn often. You can't just have the good-guy team win and show everybody cheering. That's not enough any more.

Pamela Ezell at The Huffington Post was presumably so disinterested in the movie that she spends most of her review talking about the proposed linkage you can do with President Obama and Nelson Mandela (never let her play the Kevin Bacon game) and finally reviews the movie with... "Invictus isn't a great movie but it's got great moments", and then once again wonders if President Obama is going to see it. David Ansen at Newsweek chimes in with... Invictus is not a biopic; nor does it take us deep inside any of its characters€”Eastwood views Mandela from a respectful middle distance. It's about strategic inspiration. We witness a politician at the top of his game: Freeman's wily Mandela is a master of charm and soft-spoken gravitas. Anthony Peckham's sturdy, functional screenplay, based on John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy, can be a bit on the nose (and the message songs Eastwood adds are overkill). Yet the lapses fade in the face of such a soul-stirring story€”one that would be hard to believe if it were fiction. The wonder of Invictus is that it actually went down this way.