Now that even a second-string computer can beat Boris Spassky . . .

Rating: 9/10 (30 September 2015)

. . . and Bobby Fischer at chess simultaneously, one might wonder if there's a reason to see a movie about people playing this obsolete game nearly 50 years ago. PAWN SACRIFICE is worth seeing since it documents how ONLY folks with serious brain defects can beat top-level Russians. Bobby Fischer is shown here using his paranoid schizophrenia to best Spassky, the pride of the U.S.S.R. Spassky's Russian "Evil Empire" itself was briefly crushed a few years later by an Alzheimer's-riddled Ronnie Reagan. Now another Balkan Crazy, Vladimir "Mad Dog" Putin, has arisen to threaten America on the World Chess Board, annexing U.S. allies left and right as the "sane" desk jockeys in the White House and Pentagon merely sit back and dither about it. PAWN SACRIFICE tells us it's high time that we ask ourselves, "WWBD?" If America remains stale and predictable, we'll lose. President "I-Like-Ike" Eisenhower MADE the Jewish Fischer (and no doubt thousands of other boys--non-chess-savants--in his demographic) crazy by declaring a random Jewish mom named "Ethel" from Bobby's mother's circle to be a Russian Master Spy, and electrocuting her THREE TIMES in the highly-publicized most gruesome state murder in American history. This "MAD" policy of Ike's had the U.S.S.R. shaking in its boots, not knowing what insane tactic we might undertake next, as documented in THE BOOK OF DANIEL and elsewhere. One MUST fight fire with fire, PAWN SACRIFICE proves.