Advertisement

Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Pawn Sacrifice

EVEREST (Edward Zwick) 116 minutes. Opens Friday. See listingRating: NN


A year after its debut at TIFF 2014, Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice lands in theatres with a distinct thud. Plodding and dramatically simplistic, it has the bones of a big, important biopic without actually being one.

Ostensibly about the epic 1972 chess match between American showboat Bobby Fischer and calculating Soviet player Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, the film is really about Fischer’s psychology.

Zwick doesn’t buy into the simplistic fallacy that chess drove Fischer mad, as proposed in Liz Garbus’s recent documentary Bobby Fischer Against The World. But neither does he try to understand him, presenting Fischer as a mistrustful bag of tics who actively alienates everyone he can before self-destructing. 

It’s a tough character to watch, let alone play, and Tobey Maguire falls back on that intense overacting thing he does when a director fails to set reasonable parameters for him. (See also Brothers, The Good German.) He peacocks through every scene, twitching and shouting and bugging out his eyes. By contrast, Liev Schreiber’s Spassky seems like an eminently reasonable professional trying to do a job in the face of preposterous distractions. 

About halfway through the picture I kind of wished I were watching the story play out from his perspective. It could have been a lot more interesting, and there’d have been a lot more chess. 

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted