CINEMA: Invictus

Watching this movie version of South Africa’s historic win in the 1995 Rugby World Cup is a bit like watching the old style play by England; effective but stolid, unimaginative and about as exciting as a local club fixture on a rain-logged pitch.

In England, 1995 is memorable in rugby terms as the year an unstoppable juggernaut in the shape of Jonah Lomu scuppered our chances of getting to the finals by steamrollering his way through both of the Underwood brothers and most of the other England players to boot.

In South Africa it’s famous for something else entirely. It was the year the new president, Nelson Mandela (here played by Morgan Freeman with so much gravitas each sentence takes an age to utter), using all his personal charisma and political nous, inspired his rainbow nation to get behind the Springboks – an almost exclusively white rugby team which had come to stand for all that was wrong with apartheid.

How could a black president win round his suspicious white players as well as the black citizens who loathed the Springboks so much they would cheer for any team other than their national side? Very simply, Mandela did it the old fashioned way; by charming the Springboks’ captain, Francois Pienaar (an extremely muscle-bound Matt Damon), and by invoking both his players’ and his citizens’ pride in their country.

The result was an unexpected and incredibly emotional win for the host nation who had been the underdogs in the tournament. However, the result on film is more dogged than underdog; a slow, clunky jog to the final match. Considering this is a film about a sport that can be thrillingly brutal, have moments of heart-stopping drama and explosive energy, director Clint Eastwood has opted for static head shots and long scenes driven by dialogue rather than anything kinetic and exciting.

Even the final match lacks the pace and adrenalin-rush that would capture the audience’s full attention. Both Freeman and Damon make a stab at the South African accent ,which is more or less successful at any given moment, but it is as if the stature of the characters they are playing has overwhelmed them and they never seem to really inhabit their roles.

This results in a film that is worthy but dull, probably historically accurate but uninspiring and all a bit flat.