Invictus

I heard that Morgan Freeman once said that whenever Clint Eastwood called him up about a movie he was working on to see if he was interested in playing a part he responded yes without even looking at the script. Smart man. I have been a huge fan of Eastwood not only as an actor but a director my whole life. To this day my favorite Western movie remains "The Outlaw Josey Wales" which I believe was Eastwood's directorial debut. And of course as far as Westerns go the Freeman/Eastwood tandem in "Unforgiven" has to rank highly on anyone's list.

So walking into the theater to see Invictus, I expected good things. And the movie exceeded my expectations.

I thought Freeman's role as Nelson Mandela was easily has best acting work of his long career. I started to think of all the other roles he has been in over the years, and it is a very long and distinguished list, but I don't remember him ever playing a part this convincingly. I really believed that he was Mandela. In fact, at the end of the film they display some actual photos of the rugby team that the film was based on. One photo shows Mandela in the Springbok uniform he wore for the championship game. I knew it was the real Mandela in the photo, but after watching Freeman play him, it just didn't look right.

My favorite part of the film was not the rugby game or the "feel good" parts of the movie (although the film does leave you with a great sense of elation), but the part where Freeman reads the William Henley poem that the title of the movie is taken from. I had never heard the poem before, and when Freeman reads it, it gave me chills. The last two lines, "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul" capture the essence of the man who spent so many years in a tiny prison cell and overcame incredible odds and adversity and finally triumphed.

Go see this movie if you get a chance, you will not be disappointed.

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So far I have refrained from using any rating system for my reviews, mainly because I find them to be pretty useless. However, I decided to make it a goal to get these reviews on a compilation site like Rotten Tomatoes, so in order to achieve that I guess they need some kind of quantitative value. Since I think there are many different criteria you can use to judge a movie, instead of one overall rating, I'm going to use three ratings. Here they are for Invictus:

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Acting: 5 out of 5 - Morgan Freeman gives a superb performance with good supporting jobs by Matt Damon and cast

Story: 5 out of 5 - Although the basic story of Mandela is widely known, most people don't know about the rugby team, and the story here is well constructed

Special Effects: 4 out of 5 - Not really a meaningful category for this movie, other than the rugby scenes. But I wanted to include this as one of my ratings categories since a lot of today's movies like Avatar are focused on this.