My perspective for full disclosure: I'm a NYC native who learned how the pieces move from my older brother in 1968 at age 6, improved my understanding of the game during the Fischer boom, and was a below-master level tournament player until I was 30. So I am familiar with the territory and wanted this to be good.
I totally get that this was made for an audience of children, so we need not have great expectations of it. The problem is writer/director Evan Oppenheimer is obviously enthralled by the metaphor of learning to navigate the chess board as a cognate of learning to navigate life itself; yet his portrayal of the games, and the teaching process of park hustler Abraham, suggests strongly he has never played the game himself, has little to no understanding of it, and did not bother to ask anyone qualified for help in that area. If his goal was to introduce a childhood audience to a beautiful strategy game, he wound up giving most of them at once both an overly simplistic and overly complicated, and ultimately just unrealistic idea of what playing and learning the game is really like. If his goal was something else entirely, he did not need to butcher the presentation of chess as a vehicle for whatever that goal may have been. If you're looking for a good (and far closer to realistic because it was a true story, written by someone who lived it) movie about a child chess prodigy, see "Searching for Bobby Fischer" instead.
The talents of Abraham, Dukakis and Garofalo were badly wasted on this silly script. At least new star Makenna Ballard made an auspicious debut as the protagonist, outshining the established adult actors.
