Pawn Sacrifice

Pawn Sacrifice tells the true story of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, the eccentric American grandmaster who became an unlikely celebrity when he challenged the Soviet Union’s greatest player, Boris Spassky, for the 1972 World Chess Championship.   Like the more entertaining and inventively structured The Imitation Game, released a year earlier, the film approaches it’s subject as a kind of psychological biopic crossed with a cold-war thriller.  But while Fischer is a fascinating character and his story touches on intriguing and important notions about the line between genius and madness, the film only scratches the surface of the material’s thematic potential.  The cast, featuring Tobey Maguire, Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Liev Schrieber, are all excellent, but director Ed Zwick (Glory, Blood Diamond, Love & Other Drugs) and writer Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises, Locke) fail to distinguish their picture from the dozens of other historical biopics about mental unstable geniuses.