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Clint Eastwood directed films, for me, come in two categories: his best films such as Unforgiven, Gran Turino, and Letters from Iwo Jima are amazingly sentimental, whilst his worst ones suffer from, and this might be a little harsh, extreme emotional manipulation – take the ending of Million Dollar Baby, the overacting in Mystic River, and pretty much the entirety of Changeling for instance, the latter category of which I consider to feature several of the most overrated movies of recent times. So then along comes Invictus, a drama about the 1995 South African Rugby Union World Cup winning team and Nelson Mandela’s input in using the sport to unite a divided nation, which not only throws my two category theory out the window, it also convinces me that Eastwood is capable of achieving something in-between: Mediocrity.

The problem with Invictus is that, unlike many sports films that have come before it, it doesn’t focus just on the sport or the sporting-related drama. It tries to bring together Mandela’s election victory, the man himself and the inspiration he found in prison through the poem the film is named after, the state of apartheid and class in South Africa at the time, as well as the events of the rugby tournament without really concentrating enough on any of the individual elements. It is, in other words, the film equivalent of gathering too many eggs into the one basket or, if you will, a film which tries to tackle much more than it can really handle.

Invictus does have its moments. Morgan Freeman is excellent and the character of Mandela is portrayed affectionately and sensibly with hints of his humanity, humour, and his own family problems amidst the enormity of the task he faced. There is a nice scene where the Springboks spend a day with soccer-loving children in a poor community and the only black player on the team is mobbed. But sadly the story suffers mainly through the lack of any strong leading characters apart from Mandela: Matt Damon’s Francois Pienaar who, as the team captain and the main focus on the sporting aspect of the film, is at the end of the day just a rugby player after all, and whilst there are supporting characters in the form of Mandela’s bodyguards and personal assistants while New Zealand’s Jonah Lomu is represented as the closest “bad guy” character to be found in the movie, none of them are explored enough to make the event feel as significant as it ought to have been. The rest of the cast act only as a means of connecting the few major characters together – the Springboks team in particular have very little to offer apart from uttering filler-speak and nodding their heads in agreement or shaking them in disapproval - and Pienaar’s and Mandela’s families contribute only in speaking minor lines of exposition and shouting in excitement at the final whistle.

The fairytale simply works better as a moment in history documented through word and memory than as a film, which is surprising given that, even without any liberties taken with the actual facts of the tournament as demonstrated in many of the other movies in the genre where last minute goals or touchdowns or home runs or three pointers are scored, the Springbok’s did really win the World Cup as underdogs and they did actually score a last minute drop goal in extra time in the Final and yet none of this hits home as anything remotely exciting. Unfortunately Eastwood has a deliberately slow style which is simply not suited to a story of Mandela as well as a story about a sporting miracle at the same time, when clearly he does not know how to capture the excitement of sport never mind a code of football alien and peculiar to many Americans and the mainstream audience granted how scrum shots are over-elaborated on and drop goals are excruciatingly slow-mo’d. As to the bigger question of whether South Africa’s problems improved as a result of the team’s victory, the film teases you by alluding to it through a close-up of black and white hands on the trophy and spliced-together footage of a celebrating nation but does not expand on what happened next, and what we are left with is an attempt at capturing the state of a country during a single sporting moment when the moment is better felt and experienced and almost impossible to truly capture on screen.

It is by no means a terrible film. Certainly nowhere near as awful or as ridiculous as my favourite bad sports movie Victory/Escape to Victory – starring Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, members of the England 1966 World Cup (soccer) winning squad, where English and American prisoners of war  in WWII (plus Pele) play the Nazis and win not only the final match but also their freedom. There is however a perplexing and inappropriate scene in Invictus near the end where a South African Airlines plane flies over the stadium to insinuate an act of terror which has no place whatsoever in this movie. Ultimately though we are merely left with a Mandela film which would have been better had it just focused on Nelson Mandela and where the rugby didn’t get in the way, or otherwise a rugby story better left as perhaps a feature article or a story told in a pub or in a school PE class. Fans of the sport and those interested in the former South African president will likely be left disappointed with a final product akin to that of Ang Lee directing Hulk; a talented director better suited to emotional pieces taking on a project that aims for an ambitious goal but skews the kick wide of the mark. And regardless of what the critics say, I still think Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and Changeling were much worse than this.