Some things in life are inevitable. Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela has finally come to fruition. In Invictus, the newly elected president of South Africa faces a country wriggling out from under apartheid. Rather than disbanding the Springbok—the nation’s piddling rugby team, which has traditionally been championed by the whites and the bane of the blacks—Mandela charges its captain, François Pienaar (Matt Damon), with the task of bringing the team to victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Spoiler alert: They win.

Suffice it to say, Invictus—produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, from a script by Anthony Peckham—is an “inspirational” movie: a typically uninspired genre. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with movies that make you feel good, but “feel-good” movies are not made to enlighten viewers—they’re made to make viewers feel self-satisfied for already being enlightened. These films aren’t a challenge or an aesthetic experience; they’re a pat on the back. The creative team here pats so hard that you want to wretch. Mandela, like Gandhi or Harvey Milk, is an exceptional human being whose accomplishments I have no intention of diminishing. In the movie, his liegemen claim, “He’s not a saint, he’s a man”—but these filmmakers aren’t out to make a movie about a man; Invictus is a hagiography. This civil-rights leader hasn’t the controversial credentials—or, thus, the dramatic potential—of a Malcolm X or Petey Green (the subject of Kasi Lemmons’s touching civil-rights drama Talk to Me). And for this set of filmmakers, that’s indubitably the point; they’re out to win awards for more than rugby.

It is possible to make a feel-good movie that doesn’t make you reach for Pepto-Bismol. Milk, for example, was not a great movie, but Gus Van Sant directed it with a partisan’s brio, and at least one key moment—a monologue delivered by Emile Hirsch—was rapturous. But there’s no getting around the fact that it centered on a superhero: Milk’s kryptonite was his surfeit of perspicacity, which hampered his personal life. (And even that wasn’t entirely his fault: His suicidal lover was disturbed to begin with.) In essence, Milk’s tragic flaw was being too much of a hero. To put it coarsely, Invictus is chocolate Milk. Its central figure also has a shaky family life—or so we’re told. There’s one scene featuring his estranged daughter—who criticizes his idealism—but that’s one of many plot points that Peckham raises and then gracelessly forgets about. Generally, this Mandela’s Mr. Perfect—too dogged to follow his doctor’s advice that he get some rest, and too selfless to pick up his paychecks when they come. When he’s finally confronted about this latter “fault,” he immediately decides that he’s being paid too much, and donates a portion of his income to charity.

Okay, you got me; a lot of this is probably true to life—and de rigeur for this sort of outing. But Eastwood drapes laurels around just about every frame, and Freeman wears them around his neck—along with sweaters borrowed from Cliff Huxtable’s wardrobe. Mandela’s dialogue (with such spontaneous pieties as “Forgiveness liberates the soul” and “I have a very large family: 42 million”) seems torn from the self-help section of a Barnes & Noble. Pienaar is Mandela as a white athlete, and speaks accordingly. He can’t get his head-of-state out of his head, even when his non-entity girlfriend wants to get frisky. (A friend likened the plot to Rocky Balboa bromancing the President. Touring Mandela’s former prison, Pienaar sees ghostlike images of his saintly leader staring back at him with a look of dignified longing.) Aside from the protagonists, the other characters exist merely to be skeptical of, and then won over by, our altruistic duo. (The lines that aren’t high-toned are merely functional.) Even the damn rugby players end up as virtuous as choirboys. I have friends who play rugby; it’s basically a sport for people who think football is for wusses. And yet, rarely are celebrity athletes as squeaky-clean and well-behaved as the Springbok boys—with the exception of Tiger Woods. Oh wait…

All these elements appear to be intentionally, prestigiously bland. But why is Mandela’s backstory—his transition from prisoner to president—skimped over? Where’s the tension? (The few blips of suspense are all false alarms.) Why are the main characters so static? Why is nothing made of the fact that the Springbok has only one black player? When he’s injured, and it’s kept hush-hush because he might miss out on the championship, Mandela hardly bats an eye. Unheralded, the all-star returns for the climactic tournament. Speaking of which: Sporting events can potentially unite people in support of a single, symbolic cause. And I’m sure that in 1995, in South Africa, this rugby-therapy unification was recuperative. But, really, how’s one to take seriously the message of peace and brotherhood when we’re shown slowed-down images of men clobbering one another, or huddled together, moaning like boars in heat? And all the while, Eastwood keeps the heart-warming music trilling for the Nobel Committee.

Now I don’t doubt the good intentions of those who made Invictus, just as I don’t doubt that the road to the Oscars is paved with good intentions. Judging from some of the players’ recent work, however, I also assume they’re not quite as selfless as the movie’s heroes. When I checked out David Fincher’s Seven (1995), I was shocked to discover that Freeman was actually acting—and spectacularly! Recently, he’s been the same smooth, sagacious, incontrovertibly moral compass in The Dark Knight, Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, et al. He plays Mandela—his friend in real life—reverently, but in that same one-dimensional, blue-ribbon style, though he curiously drops his accent during a scene in a car. (Mandela purportedly requested that he be played by Freeman; one can easily guess why.) For his part, Damon gives an earnest performance, but hasn’t any zippy avenues to meander down, as he did in The Informant!.

Eastwood, who’s been in the film industry since the ’50s, has been called such things as “the best classical American director since John Ford.” Perhaps that’s because “classical American” directors have been outmoded since John Ford; Eastwood apparently didn’t get the memo. The austerity of Million Dollar Baby had an old-fashioned sweetness, but his vaunted Flags of Our Fathers (and, to a lesser degree, its twin, Letters from Iwo Jima) was as rusty as the ships that sank at Pearl Harbor. Eastwood’s self-serious tediousness torpedoed Flags—and, unfortunately, the hearts of several critics. I’m sure he believes what he’s saying in Invictus—that is, he respects Mandela and isn’t a racist—but his spelling it out is what garners him acclaim.