Just saw Pawn Sacrifice, absolutely dreadful.

I enjoyed the movie, thought it was pretty close to Fischer's real life, but Toby is just to short to play Fischer. It bothered me........however his acting was good.

I just saw the movie pawn sacrifice and I hated it. Here's why.

1. Boris Spassky towers over Fischer in the movie, it looks like Spassky is a football player and Fischer is a geek about to get a wedgie. They really make Spassky seem like a mean "tough guy" type.

2. The portrayal of Bobby Fischer is a caricature, yes Fischer was paranoid, but the way he's portrayed in the movie makes him seem 100x more obnoxious than he ever was in real life, in the movie, he's always yelling about something. Even the way he talks in the movie as a kid is snobbish and brattish, not like the documentary footage I've seen. At the end they use a few real life soundbytes of him as an old man, probably the craziest soundbytes they could find, to make it seem like the caricature is real. Fischer wasn't nearly as unlikable as they make him seem in this film. The real Fischer had at least some degree of charisma, and wasn't always screaming about things and being a brat. It's like they took the paranoid, pompous side of him and made that into ALL that he was.

3. The cinematograhy itself was awful. The camera work seemed jumbled, and the editing was always cutting from one thing to the next. The music bombards the veiwer, at times I felt like I was watching idiotic music videos on VH1.

4. The actual chess is brushed aside. Chess is not central to this story, chess is used as a cardboard background prop in order to show the extreme drama of Fischer as they've created him.

5. The movie implies that chess is a game that makes people crazy. The movie tells us that Morphy killed himself because of chess. At one point one of the characters remarks "there's a billion possibilities to consider, more than the stars in the galazy, it's really easy to go off the deep end" at the end the Fischer caraciture tells us "They say there's so many possibilities, but there's always only ever one right move. In the end, there's nowhere to go."

I rate movies on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst and 10 the best. If I give a movie a 5, it means the movie is just barely good enough for me to keep watching it to the end. I give Pawn Sacrifice a 1, and I would have walked out of the theater had I been watching it alone. It's not just that it's a bad movie, it's a movie that I think is actually harmful and misrepresents the game of chess in a negative way.