Okay, let’s cut right to it, shall we. Despite all the critical acclaim and the awards, Clint Eastwood is really not a very good filmmaker. I’m sorry, he just isn’t. He’s not bad, I suppose, just kind of mediocre. Invictus suffers from the same problems all his other films suffer from. His direction is ponderous. It lumbers and is very predictable. All his scenes seem canned. For example, the scene where all the black security guards and all the white security guards are brought together uncomfortably – this scene just feels, sounds, and looks exactly like every other scene of this sort he’s ever made. Ditto with the cutesy scenes of Mandela. Ditto with EVERY scene, actually. And Clint’s camerawork, visual scene structuring and editing are all really sub par. Visually the film has this uninspired and boring uniformity about it. Compare Clint on this score to someone that really knows what they’re doing – Friedkin, Fred Zinnemann, Pauka, Sidney Pollack, Costa Gavras…  I rest my case.

The film is not well made as a biopic / political drama. A good film would have dialog to explain Mandela’s history. Why was he in prison? What did he accomplish while he was there, and how did he do it? How did he get elected? What’s the deal with his wife and family? What was he really facing as President of a torn country? What were his other leadership strategies. More talented writers could have easily built all this into the dialog. It doesn’t matter that egg-headed, intellectual snobs think every one should know this history – 1) they don’t, and 2) even if they did, it needs to be in the film anyway, to give texture.

A.O. Scott thinks this is a great sports film. It’s not a great sports film. A great sports film would have been resourceful enough to at least explain the rules of rugby and give you a better sense of the game, the players, the coaching, the strategy, and the international pecking order of clubs. It would have found a way to make watching the matches exciting (hell, Whip It was more exciting, and much better as a pure sports film, incidentally.) And a great sports film would never use extended slow-mo at the climax scene, which destroys all momentum.

And then there’s the reading of the poem Invictus. Any decent filmmaker would have made sure that the audience could understand what Morgan Freeman was saying when he narrated it. I caught about 80% of the words – simply unacceptable.

I’ve always considered Morgan Freeman the ultimate cheese-ball actor. I heard so much about how this was the role his was destined to play. Is everyone right about this? Well, if we judge his acting on how well he disappears into the role, I would say he is only moderately successful. Most of the time, I didn’t get the impression of a strong, almost saintly leader. I got the impression of Morgan Freeman slouching, sticking his lip out and trying to talk like Nelson Mandela.

Anyway, this is not a bad film, just kind of bland and predictable. Both my wife and I agreed that it was rather surprising how decidedly uninspiring this film is, given its subject and plot. That tells you something.