Invictus

Invictus. How on Earth is a title like that expected to sell cinema seats? Why would movie producers ever think that an unrevealing Latin word would attract moviegoers to a true-life tale of a foreign country's black president and its white folks' national sport? Such a tale would need a lot of marketing help and Invictus sure ain't, is it?

I'd like to ask Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood. They were two of the movie's co-producers, Eastwood also directing it and Freeman starring as South Africa's President Nelson Mandela. Matt Damon co-stars as the Springboks' captain, leading his country to unexpected victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

The movie's based on a book, Fighting for the Enemy, and that looks a lot better on a billboard. As four other movies were using the word Fighting in their title in 2009, maybe Eastwood's team had no choice. They had to find another title but, hey why that one?

The good news is the constant quality of the body of work two very-old-timers are producing together. Freeman's impersonation of Mandela is close to perfect, lacking only the width of the president's grin. An Oscar nominee, did he deserve the award more than Jeff Bridges? Yes.

Did Eastwood deserve another Best Director nomination? No. Although it's a typically craftsman-like work of cinema from the grand old man of Hollywood, it's overlong, its script is too cliched and its repetitive juxtaposition of black and white extras and settings strain an audience's tolerance of PC-ness. Its ears ache too, after too many sound effects of rugby players scrumming, thumping and grunting.

Freeman, Damon and other non-South African actors (if there were any) assume convincing accents. The sporting recreations are convincing, though I must have dozed off if there was any explanation why this version of rugby didn't have touchdowns, only high kicks. The inter-racial animosity turns into camaraderie almost convincingly, some of the time. Most of the time, though, Eastwood and the script come too close to parodying the saintly reconciliation-seeking goals of Mandela.