.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

There is no director that has been more on his game or consistent in quality output more this millennium than the legend, Clint Eastwood. This is not an opinion. This is bone fide fact. Since the turn of the century, Eastwood has helmed Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of our Fathers, Mystic River, Changeling and Grand Torino. As much as directors with such high profile names such as Scorsese and Fincher have provided us with masterpieces of their own, Eastwood has outdone, outperformed and outclassed his fellow competitors.

Just in time for awards season, Eastwood is at it again with Invictus, the true story about host South Africa's rugby team in 1995 under the presidency of recently elected Nelson Mandela. Morgan Freeman plays Nelson Mandela and although surrounded by other actors, it is a movie that seems to have Freeman in every scene.

The film begins with a brief history of the nation. We hear of Mandela's release from prison and how blacks were allowed to vote and elected Mandela their President at a time when race relations were still strained throughout the country.

During this time of racial and economical strife, Mandela crusaded through the 1995 South African rugby team in an attempt to bring both attention to his nation as well as a united front amongst his countrymen.

Matt Damon plays Francois Pienaar, the rugby team captain that has the weight of the President's and country's expectations on his shoulders during the tournament but is able to rally his team to an improbably and historically accurate result.

Invictus (which is Latin for 'invincible' and is the name of a short poem referenced by Mandela in the film) is classic Eastwood. It's mood is thin, it's pacing is deliberate and it's result is superior. Eastwood doesn't spend much time on preaching race relations. They are obvious underlines in the story's progression, but Eastwood fights any urge to preach or attempt to make any scene a hanky grabber by having whites and blacks unifying in a tear jerking moment.

Eastwood spends a good deal of time showing the lives and detail of the security team of white and black bodyguards that are commissioned around Mandela and allows for their subtle yet poignant moments to unleash any race relations moral.

Eastwood also resists with any of the many sports clichés. We do get one - the "we won't be the most talented, but we will be the fittest" comment from the coach a la Kurt Russell in 2004's Miracle, but we don't get the halftime speech or the rhythmic clapping of a jam packed arena that is so commonplace in sports biographies.

Instead, Eastwood stays on target. He could have gotten lost in any of the great initiatives or speeches that Mandela undertook during the period, but Eastwood weathers these lightly and keeps focus on ensuring that the film is aimed on being a political story of nationality through a professional sports team.

Invictus does enough of everything to get full attention during the awards season while making you forget its shortcomings. It would have been nice to know more about the poem Invictus (it gets mentioned but never read aloud), and Pienaar's political and racial opinions prior to his star struck tea meeting with Mandela would have been nice to understand his transformation. And there is a pop ballad used in the middle of the film that might just be the worst use of a song that takes away from a film's momentum in movie history. But these are small statements hidden in an above average film.

Make no mistake about it, Invictus will be remembered as a sports film. The final half hour plus of the two hour, fourteen minute running time is dedicated to the final game of the tournament and there are bone crunching hits and sweaty men in scene after scene.

This will also be the film to which Freeman is known for long after his career comes to a close. He has been better (The Shawshank Redemption, Se7en), but never has he been used in such a stoic central figure. Damon, holds his own as a beefed up Captain, but his size is still belittled by the presence of Freeman in any scene to which they share.

Invictus will take its place among the now 10 nominees for Best Picture when the Academy announces their finalists for 2009. It doesn't deserve to win, but it does deserve to be there. And Eastwood deserves credit for keeping an incredible streak strong and in tact.