Disappointing for club players, decent for almost everyone else

Rating: 4/10 (29 December 2015)

As an avid chess player growing up in the 90's, Bobby Fischer was not a central part of my development as a player. However, while growing into a decent club-level chess player it was impossible to not come across stories and games of Bobby Fischer -- he is revered by all of the very best chess champions, and the current world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, names him as the best player to have ever lived.
It turns out that knowing the superficial story of Bobby Fischer's life was detrimental to my experience of this movie. I imagine that merely remembering or merely knowing of the tumult around it would be a much better setup towards seeing the film than knowing all the details (29. ... Bxh2!??, although I can only imagine.
Pawn Sacrifice offers the portrait of Bobby Fischer, subtly laying a foundation for his delusion and paranoia early on, and exposing him honestly as an intolerable brat. His personality is shown to us in detail by Toby Maguire with great supporting roles by Peter Sarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg, and especially Liev Schreiber's excellent Spassky. Sadly, beyond the superficial, the movie does not deliver. Nor does it have to, for the casual fan or those uninterested in chess, but for those already aware of the games, Fischer's antics, and the history, it is merely an honest retelling of a story already experienced - like watching Aladdin in a 3D-animated 2009 version by different animators.