Spider-Man to Bishop 3

Rating: 9/10 (1 March 2016)

This is a look at a complex man who was both a genius and mental case. Bobby Fischer dominated the news during the sixties as he faced off with Boris Spassky, the world chess champion. Toby Maguire is excellent as the cracked talent, filled with paranoia and Cold War craziness. He believed he was the greatest chess player in the world, but is his own demons constantly got in his way. Somewhere along the line, at a very early age, he became obsessed with the red threat. His own mother rubbed elbows with communists and the whole country was in fear of the Soviet Union. Fischer, when left alone, assumed he was being bugged, and went to dramatic lengths to find these bugs. He was also highly sensitive to sound. When he met Spassky for the first match of the world championship, he began to react to even the slightest sounds. Probably about as autistic as one could be, he made the people managing him go to great lengths to appease his ridiculous demands, including holding one match in a storage room. Spassky is portrayed as a bit of a paranoic himself. This is a movie about a man who is hard to like, but the portrayal is well crafted. This is the best thing Maguire has done, in my opinion.