On paper, Invictus seemed like the kind of movie I should have loved. It tells a true story. It stars Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon (who obviously knows a few good diets for quick weight loss since he was looking fit and trim again, shortly after packing on all those pounds for The Informant). There’s a healthy dose of sports involved. It was directed by Clint Eastwood. But, man, the execution was just godawful!! The film is so boring and took so long to get off the ground that I gave up on it. I watched for 38 minutes (that’s the first seven chapters according to the DVD) before finally turning it off in frustration and disgust.
What happened in that 38 minutes? Not a whole heck of a lot. Eastwood spent most of that time showing us that there was friction between blacks and whites in the early ’90s in South Africa when Mandela came to power. Yeah, no kidding. Did it really require that many scenes to show us most blacks favored Mandela and most whites didn’t? Ugh.
There were only a couple of rugby scenes in the first 38 minutes, which is another indication of how short on action the film was.
Hey, this might have turned out to be a great movie — after all, it did get a lot of good reviews — but I’ll never know because I was bored out of my skull and refused to subject myself to any more punishment.
I give this film 0 stars out of 5.