Making Nelson Mandela's 27 year imprisonment seem as short and sweet as a weekend in the Bahamas, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is a long trudge to the end, a visual reenactment of the Madiba Cliff Notes only with extra added prestige value. It'd be tough to make your Mandela picture not come off prestigious, but Justin Chadwick has his iridescent flashback photography and sweeping score on hand to really drive home his film's key tenet - that Nelson Mandela was a real great guy, and that what the white South African government did to him was a real bad move. It's almost a relief he didn't have to suffer the injustice of witnessing this bloodless biopic. With a laboured sincerity that seeps all humour out from the character, Chadwick marches guilelessly through Mandela's life, chronicling a series of famous events and condensing many lifetimes of deep and difficult emotion into a few pat lines of trite dialogue, delivered adjacently for the sake of convenience. By now, you'd think someone would have realised that William Nicholson just can't write. And under Chadwick's obstinately artless direction, this wannabe epic, tastelessly tasteful, never gets off the ground. The distressing thing is that once this style of boring bio became commonplace, in spite of its thorough lack of artistic merit, there'll always be a market for it, and people will begin to write of qualities they deem it to have. Like if everyone started eating shit on toast, it'd become quite acceptable to follow suit, and relate of its piquant tang and firm texture. I sometimes say that I will only review a film for what it is, not for what it isn't, but alas even if no films like Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom had ever been made (and boy, have they), it'd still be not very much at all. Idris Elba gives a well-studied, committed performance under some grotesque makeup, which might explain why they didn't bother using any on Naomie Harris, who doesn't help by playing Winnie as if she were 30 years of age throughout.
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