The Coldest Game

This is a spy thriller set during the Cuban missile crisis, and centred around a fictional chess match between the Soviet and US chess champions in Warsaw. The US player is indisposed at the last minute, and the Americans substitute the last US player to beat him in a game, a college maths professor with a drink problem, played by Bill Pullman, who no longer plays chess. It transpires that the CIA have an interest in the match, with a clandestine meeting set up. But who can be trusted?

Bill Pullman is a good actor and does his best with the material, but the plot is pretty thin, the kind of thing you might see in a single episode of a TV series. There are also some irritating errors. One CIA person says that they know Russians have sent ships to Cuba but were "too small" to carry nuclear warheads. This is ludicrous, as. a nuclear warhead measures maybe three feet by one, and weighs about 100 kg. It would fit in a canoe, never mind a cargo ship.

On the chess front, I am probably being picky as I play chess quite a bit, but there are also several annoying aspects. The person who oversees the game is an "arbiter", not a "judge", and players do not pass draw offers via the arbiter, they just ask the other player. I understand that for film reasons the players are playing their moves unnaturally fast, but near the start the Pullman character says that the opening will "come down to the Italian game or the Rousseau defence" after the Russian's first move is revealed. This is absurd, as the Italian game is somewhat rare at grandmaster level, and the Rousseau opening is extremely obscure and would never be played at really top level. As for someone who hasn't played chess for a couple of decades beating the top Soviet player, that SI extremely implausible. Even Garry Kasparov, former world champion and arguably the best player of all time, struggled to perform in a tournament when he made a brief comeback a decade or so after he retired.

I had more of a practical issue with the main information to be passed at the clandestine meeting, which seemed unlikely to really be the key to the Cuban missile crisis to me but I don't want to reveal a spoiler. The bigger issue is that the film rather plods along, with limited tension. It is watchable, but hard to really recommend.

Right off the bat (or board?), there is the fact that this is or rather was based on true events. You'll either be into that or not. Bill Pullman does everything to keep you engaged though. The movie or rather the story is a bit muddled and there certainly will be confusion for many. And while Bill Pullman is a pole, some might have a problem with engaging with the movie.

Feeling something, being excited and so forth. So there are flaws, there are certain things that could be better. But it also has some fine points and there are some interesting plot points happening and some characters and places (short cuts) that are almost worth watching this alone. Again, massively flawed but also quite entertaining in a weird way

This is a captivating tale of the behind the scenes of a political chess match. Who would have thought there was so much going on behind a seemingly innocent series of chess games! It is a captivating story, with great acting as well. I really enjoyed it.

As far as Netflix-produced movies go, this is one of the best I saw. At least, it has a script that actually makes some sense, albeit in a formulaic way. After all, this is the Cold War and we've pretty much seen everything about that period in time and movie rules (and history) dictate that the Russians are the villains and nobody is to be trusted.

In this movie, the story takes place mostly in Warsaw, which makes a nice change of place from the usual Berlin. A chess championship is taking place during the Cuban missiles crises and a drunkard American professor (Bill Pullman) must act as the go-between spy, besides being the chess champion defying Russia.

Pullman looks a lot like Dennis Hopper and does a good job as the brilliant, unstable genius. His handlers are three suspicious characters, one of whom must be a mole.

My favourite scene takes places in the men's lavatory and it is edited in such a way as to make you wonder what is going on. The previous scene established a character who may also not be what he looks like and the whole plot is directly linked to the opening scene.

Quite enjoyable and suitably gritty, even if I usually don't enjoy movies where the main character is an addict.

The Coldest Game is a relatively unknown film whose scene is set in the deepest moment of the cold war, i.e. the Cuban missile crisis. It is a well made film, professionally directed and produced, despite a slightly old fashion a d artisanal look-and-feel. The plot, though well conceived, is affected by a few mistakes which to a certain degree put me off; one is a detail of general context: every time the players get of the cars there is a crowd of paparazzi waiting for them....paparazzi in Warsaw in 1962? Excuse me? Then there are a few more substantial mistakes regarding the espionage tradecraft: is it possible that there was no more discreet place for a Russian spy to pass a super secret microfilm to the opposition than a crowded chess world championship at the centre of everybody's attention? Lastly, there are a few too many murders, and it is well known that killing was a means used very very exceptionally by field agents in the course of their operations. Nevertheless the movie is a decent one and quite watchable.