Invictus feels right, although you may not believe you are watching a movie about post-apartheid South Africa and rugby directed by Clint Eastwood.

Morgan Freeman is not always Nelson Mandela.

Morgan Freeman reminds you that he is one of the best actors of his generation in this movie, but the fact that he plays Mandela here is a tiny bit of a let down: this probably means the sturdy biopic we should expect about his life is far off from now, and probably past the end of Freeman’s career. Even so, Freeman inhabits the character here, from the gestures and body language, the walking pace, the speech cadence, and the hybrid-multi-African-language accent heard in Mandela’s English.

Matt Damon is enormous and sounds, at least to my American ears, completely convincing as a white South African. At rest he resembles Francois Pienaar in size and hair color – Pienaar looks more like Sting than Matt Damon – but the action sequences show Damon looking like a real rugby player, and closely resembling the grimacing gameplay stills of Pienaar. His performance goes a long way to show off his chops as an accomplished actor, but in this movie Damon feels more like the backup band for Freeman than a partner in a duet. That isn’t bad or good, but rather just something that happens.

My friend Patrick knows much more about rugby than I do after having played the sport for several years, and he was satisfied with the treatment the game received, right down to the pre-match haka of the New Zealand team. Eastwood does it right: there’s no 20 minute expository rules lesson, but the editing shows what plays and scoring attempts equal what point amounts and how the ball is advanced down the field.

Similarly, the film assumes a certain level of historical knowledge: to really grasp what’s going on, you need to have a basic understanding of what apartheid was, how South Africa changed after it was abolished, how South Africa was before it was abolished, and who Nelson Mandela is and the role he’s played in world history. It isn’t much to ask, but I’ve heard some critics complain about it. Honestly, if you don’t know enough about basic recent history to understand this movie, you’re an awful person to begin with and I don’t want you to enjoy things.

The music choices and the score are goofy, but you get that in a Clint Eastwood movie. At least this time he didn’t write the score himself; rather, one Kyle Eastwood wrote the score. I don’t know if he’s Eastwood’s son or some other relation, but he seems to have inherited his father’s penchant for over-earnest, heavy-handed film scoring.

The only real complaint I have with the movie is that the big sports conclusion finale is in slow motion. As in, almost 10 minutes of slow motion. It’s a little much.

The script is well written, the cinematography is well done (and really shows off what a beautiful land South Africa is) and the story is great, one of those terrific tales about the very real unifying power of sport. Whereas plenty of similar stories are told with an overly saccharin feel, Eastwood shows what a professional craftsman he’s become, trading raw emotion for nuanced storytelling in all the right places. It isn’t high art by any means, but it is high quality film making.

Score

On the High Five Scale, Invictus gets 4 hakas out of 5.