This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

There is only one word needed to sum up Invictus — underwhelming. While the historically significant story is certainly worthy of a film adaptation, Invictus is little more than a clichéd sports drama, and a rather stale one at that.

We open on February 11, 1990, the day Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) was released from his South African prison cell after nearly 30 years of political incarceration. Immediately, the film shows us the divided world into which Mandela is entering. As his motorcade carves its way between two sports fields, one occupied by well-dressed whites and the other by poor blacks, we understand the film’s heart instantly. Four years later, Mandela is sworn in as South Africa’s first black president. While the whites wait in fear of retaliation for decades of violent oppression and the blacks look toward retribution and comeuppance, Mandela recognizes that, if he is to unify his country and save it from an almost certain societal implosion, he will need a miracle.

That miracle, he decides, is sport, specifically rugby. Mandela begins to woo Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), the Afrikaner captain of the Springboks, the national team that has long represented white-supremacist domination. Although the Springboks are one of the worst teams in the world, Mandela charges them with carrying South Africa’s hopes and dreams upon their backs. Only greatness will do, he tells them; we must exceed our own expectations. His charge is simple: the Springboks must overcome their abysmal record and win the 1995 Rugby World Cup, thus inspiring an entire nation toward something greater than themselves — harmony, concord and a common purpose. (You may want to study up on the rules of rugby before heading to the theater; the film assumes you know what’s going on.) It is a canny bit of political maneuvering, a symbolic first step in an overture for peace. For once, a sporting victory is to be about more than just winning a match.

Director Clint Eastwood has never been a particularly great director despite the fact that he has made some great films. He is extraordinarily competent behind the camera, but not particularly creative. His strength is in a classical, unembellished aesthetic that never gets in the way of the stories he chooses to tell. The real source of his success is his ability to recognize and seize winning material. He has his finger on the pulse of what most moves us and serves it up on a silver(screen) platter.

Based on John Carlin’s book, “Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation,” Invictus, which takes its name from a Victorian era poem by British poet William Ernest Henley (“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” — a refrain Mandela habitually recited to himself while in prison), actually has something to say and throbs with the heartbeat of a historical story too good to be true and certainly worth repeating. Why then does it come across so bland? Invictus means well and you certainly want to like it, but the fact remains it is conventional, cloying and colorless.

Eastwood and South African screenwriter Anthony Peckham chose not to develop any of their main characters. Damon had the easier task as no one outside South Africa knows the name Francois Pienaar. Damon’s Francois is little more than a well-meaning sport meathead. If he has opinions about apartheid or President Mandela, we never hear them. His relationship with his country’s leader is, by and large, ceremonial. It’s always risky to portray historical figures while they yet live, especially ones as iconic as Nelson Mandela. Eastwood’s version of Mandela is safe, a faultless saint, an immaculate, unimpeachable figure who remains firmly ensconced atop his pillar and never once steps down to become flesh and blood. Freeman’s portrayal is spot on, but he is never given anything more to do than spout inspirational wisdom and rousing lines of dialogue. Even in private moments, with close friends or family members, when we might expect him to drop his noble guard at least for a moment, Mandela is perfect to the point of insufferability. Never is there any attempt to get to the bottom of either man.

Instead, Invictus wastes vast amounts of its running time on Mandela’s security detail, evoking Eastwood’s previous film, In the Line of Fire. The men, both white and black and none too happy to be working together, are intended as our conduit into the executive office. However, in terms of the narrative, their presence is inconsequential. While they worry and fret over the new president’s safety, we are never once shown a threat, legitimate or otherwise (though Eastwood tries to fool us into believing some exist on one too many occasions). Peckham simply employs them as mouths through which he can create overlong, on-the-nose, talky conversations about racial distrust, despite the fact that there were other, more organic, narratively justifiable ways he could have accomplished the same goal. Outside of these characters, the populace of South Africa is represented as cardboard cutout racist Afrikaners and bitter, angry blacks. Invictus, it seems, is more interested in the national temperature than that of any particular individual. But what the film fails to realize is that without individuals with whom we can identify, we will be unable to gain access into the emotional core of the film.

Invictus’ message may be noble, but its delivery system leaves much to be desired. Eastwood, never one for subtlety, relies on overly simplistic narrative techniques to tell his story. This patronizing hand-holding, complete with overly sentimental songs about color-blindness that erupt at the most inappropriate moments, threatens to swamp an uncomplicated and straightforward message about tolerance, equality and courage. Even the obvious contemporary American subtext (a historic black president’s efforts to unite a country still at odds with its racist past) is ignored.

Eastwood gets the history right, but little of the emotion. Invictus looks fantastic (the production benefits greatly from access to the real locations), but lacks the situational awareness to translate that into emotional resonance. Predictable and uncomplicated, the film lacks the very human touch it so desperately requires.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.