Much like a pawn wanting to become a King, this movie wants to be more than it ever can be.
Several aspects of this movie are not where they need to be to create a quality horror/suspense film. I never got "sucked in;" I was always aware I was watching a movie. There was no part of this that felt like a real human drama; rather, it felt like actors playing parts, and your film is screwed when that's what's coming through.
Quality writing has a way of attaching your mind to the action in the film and drawing you in, and this simply does not do that. The script comes off as too simplistic for what this movie wants to be as a whole. The chess thing is not done terribly well and gets played through too simply (kind of like this last sentence I just wrote. Bleh.)
The characters are relatively flat. Not much time is taken to learn about them, not much is done to develop them into anything past a two-dimensional image.
There's nothing else really that stands out either. Acting is meh, cinematography is meh. Story was relatively simple with some twists, a couple of which I don't think got flushed out.
I think there's something of an idea for a pretty good story here, but it's not explored properly enough.
All in all, far from the worst movie I've seen. It kept moving, which buys it a star. Still, not a lot going right for it. No reason to come back to this. There is something incomplete about the feel of this movie. Feels too generic like so many movies do these days.
If you're watching for Kevin Nash, he's got...maybe a dozen lines in this? He's not bad, but he's not good either. This had to be an easy paycheck for him.
