Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

First off, I was seriously skeptical about Idris Elba starring as Nelson Mandela, given the radical disparity in their appearance—at least judging by the well-known images of Mandela. Of course, most of us have not seen what he looked like as a young man, but it just seemed highly unlikely that it would be anything like the man who so successfully portrayed Stringer Bell in The Wire. To my amazement, some fantastic cosmetic work was done on Elba so that, at least in his later years, he bore some resemblance to Mandela. All in all, I was very impressed with Idris Elba's performance, even in the early part of the story, when he looked more like Stringer Bell. Maybe I should not be surprised, given that I have yet to encounter a case of bad acting on his part. As for the depiction of Mandela's life, the opening did a good job of showing how and why Mandela became involved in terrorist actions (vandalism), and the ending did a good job of showing how, after a few setbacks, he finally managed to quell violence. However, there was a huge jump from asking for trousers in the Robben Island prison to suddenly being invited to serve as the leader of Black South Africans and bring an end to the uncontrollable violence in the streets. There probably should have been a bit more included from the eighteen- year period of Mandela's imprisonment on the island. His writing? His other attempts at reform? Obviously, he did not become singled out for having succeeded in securing long pants for the "boys" or for having obediently broken rocks with the rest of the chain gang. What did Mandela do to garner the attention of the white South African leaders? No clue is given in this version of the story.Notwithstanding the missing details from the prison period, I consider this film to be a relative success. The acting was great all around, and the story shows the major events needed to make sense of Mandela's life. I would definitely recommend that anyone who is ignorant of this great man's story watch the movie. Obviously, this is not a scholarly biography, and I am confused about some of the reviewers who are comparing it to that, finding fault for it not being what it is not and could never be. There are limits to what can be done in even a long film (pushing 3 hours), and given those constraints, I feel that history has been responsibly represented, showing both sides of what happened—the fear on the part of the whites, how it turned into brutality; and the anger on the part of the blacks, how it turned into desire for revenge.

Idris Elba looks nothing like Madiba and yes that matters, because no matter how good the performance is, if an actor looks nothing like the person he is portraying, I can't get as invested. For example, part of the reason why Ali was a good film was because Will Smith looks like Ali. You think the film would have been as good if they cast Eddie Murphy in the role? Another main problem with the film is that it tries way to hard to fit every aspect into the story. In doing so, ironically we miss some of the emotional intensity of certain scenes. For example, I would have loved to have seen more of him in Ruben Island. Idris Elba gives his best as well as the rest of the cast, but the script they are given gives them very little to work with.Overall, there are a few pretty shots and like I said Idris Elba does give a good performance. However, if I'm honest, the lack of similarities between Elba are too distracting and the film is definitely worth skipping.

Let me start this review by saying that I'm a huge fan of Idris Elba's work in "Luther", so I was quite curious to which extent he could pursue his big movie career with the truly showy role of Nelson Mandela, which brought Morgan Freeman an Oscar nomination not too long ago. Well.. it did not for Elba, but after reading many criticism that he just doesn't look the part, I was actually pleasantly surprised when I finally got to watch the movie. The make-up was very fine and I also liked U2's Golden Globe winning song, even if I was glad Frozen's song got the Oscar afterward.The film is a nice biopic on Mandela from his early years up to his later years and summarizes efficiently in roughly 2.5 hours why he did what he did and how he became who he was. As this came out in the year of Mandela's death, it earns additional relevance. Here and there was a scene I was not too fond of, like the whole pants in prison focus. Obviously, it showed Mandela's early fight for equal rights, but it left me rather unattached. Director Justin Chadwick shows us his take on the South African legend here, a couple years after Eastwood in what could almost be described more of a sports movie. I enjoyed Chadwick's "Other Boleyn Girl", which received mostly bad reviews and he did not disappoint me here either. Naomie Harris worked with him before in "The First Grader" and this may not have been the last cooperation of the two. Still, I remember she received lots of early hype as a possible Academy Award favorite for her character here, but I (and also the awards world) felt she could not really fulfill the ambitions. Her character was truly militant and showed nice contrast to Elba's Mandela, but that's all there really was to her. Not the depth one had hoped for. If it's her fault or the script's fault, who knows.As much as I was entertained by the film, I also have to say that it did not bring the outstanding moments, the main character's biography had offered and that could stay in mind for a long time. Of course, the cell he was in for decades was a central point here as well just like in Eastwood's approach. In addition, it was also nice to find out a bit about the people Mandela was working with, especially the high-profile statesmen both black and white, in shaping South Africa the way it became today. I would like to close this review by saying, despite some criticisms I recommend watching this movie and by mentioning my favorite scene which was how delighted they were after the trial that they were not sentenced to death. Still, life in prison is not a bowl of cherries either, but all that mattered that very moment was that he would live and I really liked the way they managed to depict that scene to make it relevant.

If you didn't know Idris Elba before this, you will remember his name after this. Mandela you knew (most likely), but if you hadn't read up on him or followed his his life in general, you might not know some of the things that are displayed here. And he's not only shown as being "good" (though that term is always something that can be argued about) in the movie either.Every man has downsides and every man will have flaws. That doesn't change the fact that Mandella did something great and was a voice that could not be silenced. This lead to family issues obviously and those are portrayed here too. It's hard to get all the details and since this is a movie there is some freedom (no pun intended) in the storytelling. But overall this could be watched in History classes in School.