Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Laden with dramatically cliched and generic rousing scenes, director Justin Chadwick's "Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom", set against the backdrop of long-established institutional racism, is a far cry from an awe-inspiring and stimulating biopic.

Contrary to Mandela's life that had enough drama, the film fails to capture any of it...making it boring at times. It works because of the real life story of Mandela. An iconic world figure deserves a much better biopic! Here they don't call it a 'long walk' for no reason, the film is 140 minutes long and that is very long for this genre.

All said and seen, Mandela is watchable because of the powerful story rather than the depiction of the story.

As a beginner's guide to Mandela, it's respectable; as cinema, it feels shackled by the greatness of its subject. Most curiously, it's terrified of the very thing that defined him: politics.

...a straightforward, chronological look at Mandela's life from boyhood to old age. It's a carefully balanced film that may not do full justice to Mandela, but it's more invigorating than the filmi Mandela we saw in Clint Eastwood's Invictus.

Every nation wants a biopic that reminds it of a time when it produced great souls. Accordingly, Mandela is drenched in nobility. Given the difficulties that Mandela and his fellow South Africans have endured, it's possible to ignore the two-hanky sentimentality, soaring finale and the experience of a half-done portrait that's waiting for a more clear-eyed artist.