Pawn Sacrifice

Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice is an enthralling piece of mainstream entertainment that captures the essence of Fischer’s mad genius, perfectly re-creates the tenor of the times AND works as a legit sports movie about the great game of chess.

Pawn Sacrifice sticks admirably close to the facts of that peculiar historical moment, and features a showboat performance from Tobey Maguire as the increasingly disturbed Fischer, along with a more composed one from Liev Schreiber as the taciturn Spassky.

The achievement of Edward Zwick’s new Fischer biopic, Pawn Sacrifice, is that it does just that. It manages to turn thinking into action.

Pawn Sacrifice clicks along with crisp efficiency. Zwick, the director behind movies like Glory and Blood Diamond, is old-school in his attention to craftsmanship, alive to telling details.

Makes the case that Fischer's chess prowess and his mental illness were inextricable. The chess fed the paranoia which supported the chess which drove Fischer deeper into madness, and so on.

Pawn Sacrifice tells a fascinating story in unspectacular fashion, resulting in a draw.

Maguire flails around obligingly, happy to trade amiability for a decent fist at capturing the difficult, prickly Fischer. But he can’t quite carry it off, and the way the script dances around the edge of his illness, exploring the surface symptoms without trying for deeper psychology, leaves the actor exposed.

This movie will be appreciated more by people who lived during this era That being said ...BRILLIANT ||| What a great adaption of the importance which was placed on each of their shoulders by their governments. Nationalism was at an all time high & the Cold War helped stoke the fire. Toby Maquire was absolutely spectacular as was the supporting cast. By far the "Best Movie" frontrunner in my opinion. BRAVO ...BRAVO

In 1972 there's was plenty of stuff going on. The moon landings were still happening. There was Watergate. The Vietnam War. The Yom Kippur war. So why was the game of chess dominating the mainstream media for several months? Because of the cold-war battle between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. It was so famous it caused a huge spike in chess interest around the world for the next decade. However this movie didn't make me feel engaged in anyway. It was largely factual, but somehow made the event seem small and inconsequential. If you want to experience just how big this chess event was instead watch the excellent "Bobby Fisher against the world" documentary.

Though the performance from Tobey Maguire is fantastic and the mental condition aspect of the film is handled perfectly, Pawn Sacrifice does largely fall a bit flat. Though it is never boring or a bad film, it only rarely captivates and even worse, it is like every other biopic ever made. Following the biopic formula to a fault, Pawn Sacrifice gave me deja vu many times as I could have sworn I saw this film before, even though I had not. This is problematic for a biopic. Fortunately, the story of Bobby Fischer is quite interesting, the scenes of his mental turmoil are grueling and sad to watch, and the performances of Maguire, Peter Sarsgaard, and Liev Schrieber, are all very, very good. At the end of the day, I wish this one was just not so typical because it has a good story, but its generic nature certainly hurt it at the end of the day.

Bobby Fisher is not nearly the best chess player nor worthy of the multitudinous movies about him sheerly as he is an uninteresting character. Just not that interesting.

........the direction of this film is SO HEAVY HANDED that I soon felt numb and then indifferent and **** feels like a 1970s Made-for-TV movie that used to make a lot of sense when you were 12 years old i.e., everything gets TELEGRAPHED to you in scene after scene and those ominous words "dumbed down" soon hover over every scene...... the scattered all-over-the-map script seems to be searching in vain for a focus to help organize the **** moderate this criticism somewhat, I would add that biography can be one of the most unforgiving film genres there is.......aesthetically- speaking people often end up living extremely unsatisfying lives !