Checkmate

A B-grade movie and a bad one at that. The film obviously had a small budget and it showed.

The film lacked atmosphere. There was no ambiance of background sounds, noise etc. The scenes outdoors where far too quiet. Plus where is the public? There were no people seen in the background. Making the scenes look obvious they were filed in a studio (rather than on location).

And what's worse than the acting was the lack of basic FX. Wait, I change that, the acting was worse.

Don't waste one and half hours of your time watching this. That time is better spent watching the grass grow.

It's funny that the movie references chess for its title, because there's barely any hint of intelligent present. Ambitiously, it mixes many subplots and alternating timelines together even though Checkmate can't even get one perspective right. Underutilized actors, excessive amount of profanity and utter lack of logic make this movie into a terribly sketchy experience.

Story revolves around the events of a bank heist. Unlike recent thrillers where there's a clear plan, Checkmate goes old school with mask and gun through the front door. There are a lot of subplots slapped together for any dramatic effect. They can't all miss their marks, right? Sadly, and incredibly, they can.

It's nearly amazing that not one character feels believable. You have the sniper priest, desperate thugs, mafia kingpins and poor sick kid, all of which have zero on-screen credibility. The pacing is completely off, it might try to shift between different perspectives for better development, but the shoddy delivery only makes narrative worse.

Script is all kind of swearwords. The most used lines are variation of "F this, F that". I'm not kidding, it's literally repetition of F-bomb while a few of more notable actors like Danny Glover and Vinnie Jones spew gibberish from facebook cat poster or random quote book. You'll hear crude profanity or pretentious bible quote for the entire movie as well as screeching repetitive soundtracks.

Then, there's the problem of the logic. The robbers put on their mask on the step of the back where camera and witness might spot them. They voluntarily run away from cover and shoot a la Rambo. There are so many things wrong with the logic, but the movie just brushes it off as though audience wouldn't notice.

Checkmate plays with mindless plots and dribbling profanity. It's a chain of awful sequences thrown randomly together that deserves no viewing.

I recommend watching this movie just so you can judge for yourself how bad it really is, five famous people in it but nobody did any good acting, that said, it had interesting ideas which kept my girlfriend and I watching it all the way through, I like how everything converged at the end but ultimately the bad acting ruined the entire movie.

Vinnie Jones does yet another bad film, Mischa Barton didn't do anything, Sean Astin was an interesting character but could have been better, Michael Pare hasn't improved since the eighties (loved Streets of Rage 1984) I got the impression the helicopter was the shadow of a cardboard cut out, I could go on but I think you need to see it for yourself, I gave it a 2 because it did keep me watching

This movie is almost worth watching just to see how ridiculously bad it is.

Every 3rd word or so is an F bomb. That wouldn't be a problem if there was some kind of reason for it or if it were in context. But it's not. It's like the director just said "Throw in a lot of F's just to shock the viewer".

Catholilc priest is a sniper hit-man. Seems totally out of context to the movie. But there doesn't seem to be much "context" to the movie at all anyway.

Two guys playing high stakes chess for some kind of document that might be something like "Immortality". The "Devil" guy that loses the game has thugs with guns that can't beat a chick with a samurai sword. So after those thugs get beat up he calls on his "back up thugs" which consists of people in bathing suits wearing devil Halloween masks. Needless to say the devil aspect has no context to the movie either.

Chick flies a Robinson helicopter with something like a sailboat tiller in reverse. Then in another shot she has some kind of steering wheel.

SWAT team...Couple dozen cops can't shoot a guy standing in the open on the roof. In all fairness, that guy, with his automatic sub-gun, can't hit any of the cops either. Cops fail to notice the bad guy sniper on the roof, the priest sniper in the building across the street nor the bad guy getaway van with two thugs parked in plain view.

None of the actors seemed like they had any lines. It's like some director grabbed anyone off the sound stage and said "OK, sit here, pick up the phone and say something like ""Put me through to Captain""..." The incorrect grammar in my above actual line was deliberate. It's the actual line.

If the acting had been great, it would almost be like a really good parody movie, like "Airplane" or "Police Story" one of the Mel Brooks movies. But the acting sucked. The technical believability sucked. The continuity sucked. And the actors all looked like someone they rounded up at the last minute and offered them lunch if they'd be in the movie.

**** The movie is plain awful **** It was on Netflix, saw Danny Glover and expected something. What an unbearable movie. Normally I read the reviews and STOP. I never like to post any commentary. This time, the movie was so horrible, I broke my promise to myself, created an Yahoo! ID, confirmed it and created the IMDb id, confirmed it and then typed it. I am so determined to post this so that no one goes through the horror of watching this movie. Waterboarding may not be this horrible. And what is with the F* bombs, is it supposed to make them look 'bad'. Their acting (or lack of that) ensures that they are bad. What a horrible piece of movie. They could have sent the money on this to some charity organization. Is this a piece done for some laundering ?