Personally I don’t play chess and couldn’t ever imagine that watching a film about CHESS would be exciting…edge of your seat exciting. Well, I was so wrong. ‘Pawn Sacrifice’directed by Ed Zwick and written by Steven Knight is just that and more.

Tobey Maguire, in an Oscar worthy performance, plays Bobby Fisher, a mentally ill, brilliant chess master.

At the age of six, Bobby was living in Brooklyn, New York and was already at the point where he could dominate anyone that challenged him. By the time he hit his teens, he became an international grandmaster. Unfortunately, Bobby’s meteoric rise is coupled with his unpredictable erratic behavior and his escalating demands which pisses off the conservative chess establishment.

As Bobby travels the globe with manager Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg) and coach, Father Bill Lombardy (Peter Saragaard) Fisher crushes the world’s top players in his relentless pursuit of his ultimate opponent, the Soviet chess grand-master, Boris Spasky (Liev Schreiber) who has never lost a match.

In 1972, the match between Spasky and Fisher was called ‘MATCH OF THE CENTURY. This was a 21 game competition held in Reykjavik Iceland and one that could finally end 24 years of Soviet domination of the World Chess Championship. Everyone in both countries were glued to their televisions to see the outcome.

But Fisher’s paranoia and growing obsession with conspiracy theories wind up disrupting the match and unnerves the normally unflappable Spassky. With the competition increasingly mirroring the tense politics of the Cold War era, even Bobby’s closes advisor are unsure if Fisher’s actions are the calculated antics of an antisocial eccentric or a sign that he is truly unstable.

‘Pawn Sacrifice’ which opens in theatres, Wednesday, September 16th is a riveting and revealing portrait of the troubled genius who sparked an international chess craze and captures the imagination of the world. Plus the sound track including music froom the 60’s and 70’s is absolutely awesome.