To their credit, the film manages to somehow be well paced and never boring despite its 152-minute running time. Writer William Nicholson (who recently helped co-write Les Misérables) and director Justin Chadwick seem less concerned with the smaller idiosyncrasies as much as they are pumping in as much as they possibly can into the film. We only get fragments and ideas of what happened during this time, never a whole concrete story. From the on-set, it wants to tell the life story of Mandela, but only cherry picks what it deems necessary to get from his being a lawyer to becoming President. Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom is a good film, but it is heavily misguided. The film follows him through his 27 years in prison, before his eventual rise to power as the first black President of South Africa. Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom, as the film’s credits suggest, tells the story of the titular character (Idris Elba), a black lawyer in South Africa who becomes a political activist during the age of apartheid. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, based on his own book, aims to change that.
Even fewer films have been made about Nelson Mandela, the revolutionary who fought against the despicable piece of legislation. And while the genocide and horrors of World War II have been covered in films for decades, apartheid is a subject very few films have tackled (Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom being one of the few to address the subject head-on). Apartheid is a dirty subject that most people want to forget ever happened, much less believed actually existed.
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