The Coldest Game (2019)
Man was this film boring. A quarter of the way through I just went on my phone. I probably missed something important, but that's neither here nor there, because the final product is a meaningless movie that lacks the tension and thrills it so desires to aspire to.
The Coldest Game (Lukasz Kosmicki, Ultraviolet) stars Bill Pullman (Dark Waters) as the genius mathematician and chess player, Joshua Mansky, who gets embroiled in the very high stakes affair that was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Except from watching this drivel you'd hardly be able to tell.
There's one key feature of a thriller that is so integral to it's success;have a guess as to what it is. I'll give you a clue, it's in the name. If you said thrills, boy are you as smart as old Mansky-poo over here. This film has an abundance of nothing, and a whole nothing of thrills. It struggles to give me even one reason to care, at all, about anything that's going on. It's not shot well, it's not written well, it is tonally inconsistent throughout, and, worst of all, it's boring.
I was reminded of the rather excellent Battle of the Sexes (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris, Ruby Sparks) while watching this. In that movie (and oh boy is this a very basic summary of that film, which you should absolutely watch over this) two people, who both need the victory for different reasons, compete in a high stakes tennis match. In this, Mansky is brought in to compete against his Russian counterpart in a chess game that's supposed to show good faith between the USA and Russia. Except, where Battle of the Sexes excelled in making a tennis match appear exciting and tense, The Coldest Game barely shows us any actual chess and this is arguably it's biggest downfall. The chess part of the film is so downplayed, that by the end (spoilers ahead) when Bill Pullman doesn't appear for the final match, there's seemingly zero consequences. When they're playing, we never see any of their moves, or if we do it's tossed together in the overly burnt wok that is this films editing. You can barely make anything out, and the editing is so choppy and nonsensical at times, that it's impossible to get a grasp on what they're doing. I theorise that it's because the filmmakers didn't know the first thing about chess, so they didn't want to embarrass themselves by making a mistake. But if that isn't the case, then this is so much worse. Why not show the chess? You can make it exciting, just like Battle of the Sexes made tennis exciting.
This film has so many characters and so many convoluted plot-points, that I genuinely could not follow what was going on, even when I was trying. When the final credits rolled, I was more excited than I had been throughout the entire 1hr 43 minute run-time of this awful, boring, by the books, cookie cutter, crappy movie. It's not an insult or anything like that, and in fact its final frames where it divulges the real reason behind the movie (the recent controversy of both the USA and Russia withdrawing from the INF treaty), made me feel like there could have been something to this. It could have been good. But it's not. It misses the mark on so many occasions, and gets the fundamentals of film-making wrong. It forgets what makes an interesting film, it clearly doesn't understand plotting or narrative cohesion, and it fails to grasp what makes this genre so engaging and captivating in the first place. If you want to bore yourself, then watch this. If you want to see poor performances, then watch this. Heck, if you want to punish someone, get them to watch this. But, in all seriousness, don't waste your time on this one. I'm so annoyed I did.
2/10
The Coldest Game (Lukasz Kosmicki, Ultraviolet) stars Bill Pullman (Dark Waters) as the genius mathematician and chess player, Joshua Mansky, who gets embroiled in the very high stakes affair that was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Except from watching this drivel you'd hardly be able to tell.
There's one key feature of a thriller that is so integral to it's success;have a guess as to what it is. I'll give you a clue, it's in the name. If you said thrills, boy are you as smart as old Mansky-poo over here. This film has an abundance of nothing, and a whole nothing of thrills. It struggles to give me even one reason to care, at all, about anything that's going on. It's not shot well, it's not written well, it is tonally inconsistent throughout, and, worst of all, it's boring.
I was reminded of the rather excellent Battle of the Sexes (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris, Ruby Sparks) while watching this. In that movie (and oh boy is this a very basic summary of that film, which you should absolutely watch over this) two people, who both need the victory for different reasons, compete in a high stakes tennis match. In this, Mansky is brought in to compete against his Russian counterpart in a chess game that's supposed to show good faith between the USA and Russia. Except, where Battle of the Sexes excelled in making a tennis match appear exciting and tense, The Coldest Game barely shows us any actual chess and this is arguably it's biggest downfall. The chess part of the film is so downplayed, that by the end (spoilers ahead) when Bill Pullman doesn't appear for the final match, there's seemingly zero consequences. When they're playing, we never see any of their moves, or if we do it's tossed together in the overly burnt wok that is this films editing. You can barely make anything out, and the editing is so choppy and nonsensical at times, that it's impossible to get a grasp on what they're doing. I theorise that it's because the filmmakers didn't know the first thing about chess, so they didn't want to embarrass themselves by making a mistake. But if that isn't the case, then this is so much worse. Why not show the chess? You can make it exciting, just like Battle of the Sexes made tennis exciting.
This film has so many characters and so many convoluted plot-points, that I genuinely could not follow what was going on, even when I was trying. When the final credits rolled, I was more excited than I had been throughout the entire 1hr 43 minute run-time of this awful, boring, by the books, cookie cutter, crappy movie. It's not an insult or anything like that, and in fact its final frames where it divulges the real reason behind the movie (the recent controversy of both the USA and Russia withdrawing from the INF treaty), made me feel like there could have been something to this. It could have been good. But it's not. It misses the mark on so many occasions, and gets the fundamentals of film-making wrong. It forgets what makes an interesting film, it clearly doesn't understand plotting or narrative cohesion, and it fails to grasp what makes this genre so engaging and captivating in the first place. If you want to bore yourself, then watch this. If you want to see poor performances, then watch this. Heck, if you want to punish someone, get them to watch this. But, in all seriousness, don't waste your time on this one. I'm so annoyed I did.
2/10
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