Hmm… I’ve been holding onto this and a couple of other movies to write about for a week now until I had something that gave me a larger body of words to bury them under, lol, because I just really didn’t have a lot to say about them. There was no reason I would necessarily have my attention seized by a story about football uniting people over race in apartheid Africa, but I had more hope for this one than I might have otherwise because Clint Eastwood is frankly on a roll lately. I mightn’t have been personally wowed by Flags of Our Fathers and Iwo Jima but the achievement was immeasurable, and last year’s Changeling and Gran Torino both remain among my top 10 of the year.

This is as solidly built as anything Eastwood has done in the last 10 years, for sure. I just was never going to be interested in this story. I was excited for Morgan Freeman’s performance as Mandela, but if I’m absolutely honest, I even found disappointment here. Freeman is an amazing actor but he really felt lost to me here. He can do a lot of things but this movie shows he is not up to portraying real people of such magnitude. The fact that I was more impressed by Matt Damon’s performance (which is the best he’s been since The Talented Mr. Ripley) really says it all.

Tags: apartheid, race, sport, true story

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 9:28 pm and is filed under 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.