Rob Houwing

I cringed almost instantaneously when I learnt that I’d cracked the guest list for a premiere screening of Hansie: A True Story.

But it had absolutely nothing to do with any suspicions I might have had that the movie would be an overly sentimental and generous portrayal of the life of the fallen national cricket captain.

After all, the oft-imperilled project could hardly have started as anything but a subjective exercise - unashamedly written and produced, as it is, by Cronje’s own brother Frans. (And fair cop to him for the monumental effort, much of it financially and no doubt emotionally traumatic, he very clearly put into its creation.)

It’s a free world and his “inner family-based” perspective is as entitled to its public airing as have been the independent documentaries and many other forms of judgement which have cast the late Wessel Johannes Cronje in a far more brutal, unforgiving light.

So no, my reservations were always going to start on different grounds. More specifically, the unavoidably tongue-in-cheek way in which I have always tended to judge sports movies!

By my book there haven’t been many truly great ones, just for starters. Raging Bull with Robert de Niro is a near-classic, and Cool Runnings inevitably leaves me in good humour whenever I see a televised re-run, but generally top-flight international sport does not translate comfortably onto celluloid.

Actors, you see, however lofty their cinematic reputations, are always going to battle almightily into the wind to replicate real-deal sporting combat, aren’t they?

Yes, I know that Ipswich Town’s Kevin Beattie effectively wore Michael Caine’s boots anyway for his on-pitch requirements in Escape to Victory, and club-mate Paul Cooper made Sly Stallone look as cat-like as possible in goal, but at the end of the day an orthodox football fan is hardly going to be thoroughly convinced by Hollywood big-knobs poncing around in soccer kit.

Ditto the outrageous implausibility of the Rocky movies, where every punch seems to have treble the velocity of an average Klitschko uppercut, yet the ultra-bloodied, mashed-to-confetti protagonists just do not go down.

Most complex

Now I know the actual “sport” scenes - conveniently - often do not occupy vast tracts of a film’s overall time anyway, but as a sports enthusiast you almost unavoidably stringently insist they cut the old mustard, don’t you?

And cricket, being one of the most complex and multi-faceted sporting codes of all, must be particularly difficult to portray with any semblance of accuracy on the big screen. (Remember Forest Whitaker’s desperately dodgy bowling action in an admittedly rare cricket scene in The Crying Game?)

So against that backdrop, let me say I was pleasantly taken aback by the “cricket” aspects of the Hansie movie.

For one thing, the lead actor, Frank Rautenbach, didn’t exactly wing-and-prayer it, as they say.

Though clearly the beneficiary of Frans Cronje’s own cricketing pedigree - 10 years as a first-class all-rounder between 1987 and 1997, for Free State, Griquas and Border, remember - he also underwent several dedicated months of coaching under one Nick Ferraby, a 25-year-old Englishman who, Cricinfo reveals, has played a smattering of one-dayers for Leicestershire.

It pays off, to a good degree: Rautenbach gets Hansie’s batting mannerisms - his posture, the way he walked between overs, the bat-waving, his trademark slog-sweep action – feasibly close to correct. Not to mention, of course, the perennially upright collar and Cronje’s choices in casual-wear, which didn’t require quite as much rocket science.

The moments of necessary cricket “action” focus primarily around Hansie’s heroics against Australia at the Wanderers in the first game of the ODI series of 1993/94, when he lashed his maiden century in that format (112 off 120 balls) and South Africa won a nail-biter by five runs.

Cronje, then 24, gave Shane Warne’s bowling (10-0-56-0) short shrift that day, and the actor who plays Warney, Fraser Nixon, gets the wrist action close to the button (all he had to do otherwise, of course, was look marginally hefty, bleached blond and wear tons of facial sunscreen).

Effervescent energy

Whoever played a gangly young Glenn McGrath, too, needs to do little more than place his hands on his hips and look indignant as he gets caned for four, as if some law has just been heinously broken. (Perhaps that’s exactly why McGrath became so infernally parsimonious!)

You get brief bursts throughout the movie of the “Jonty” character (Alistair Moulton-Black), of course - restless, effervescent energy the key requirement.

Nick Lorentz, who plays Bob Woolmer, gets the nasal drawl and usually docile demeanour of the late coaching legend suitably accurate - not to mention the generous waistline - while Andre Jacobs as Ali Bacher looks more like Sol Kerzner but gets away with it.

Nasser Hussain might not be too charmed to learn that, very fleetingly played by one Chris van Rensburg for the fateful “let’s play for a result” last-day-of-the-Test decision at Centurion, he is made to look like the stereotypical weedy Englishman: we know that Hussain as England captain was made of rather sterner stuff, both physically and mentally.

Unfortunately “Allan Donald” is made to look like a decidedly military-medium trundler, and the weakest cricketing facet of the movie is the all-too-obviously computer-generated crowd backdrop for the supposedly seething “Edgbaston” for the unforgettable World Cup semi-final of 1999.

On the whole, though, I’ve seen many worse movies come out of Hollywood and elsewhere - and on infinitely more swollen budgets - in terms of their intended devotion to sporting detail.

I’ll leave you to make up your own mind on the more general merits of the movie, suffice to say that I heard iconic critic Barry Ronge on radio describe it as “very watchable” shortly after I saw it myself.

Given the pre-considered, Frans Cronje-perspective template for the film I’ve already mentioned, I wasn’t a million miles away from concurring.