Real American

This film is a fevered dream of Cold War patriotic propaganda yet none of the baggage that comes with that is even worth discussing due to the absolutely ridiculous writing. Even in a fantasy there needs to be an element of believability. You have to believe that whatever is happening is reasonable and possible for whatever world said action is happening in. That being said, this film asks too much of the audience. We are expected to believe that this professor is some super genius whose intellect is so wildly out of control that he requires enormous quantities of alcohol to regulate it? Not only that, the alcohol improves his performance! But no, that's not enough, not only is he a magical drunk genius, he is also able to resume playing chess after a 20 year hiatus and defeat the best players in the world! To add insult to injury, it is immediately and painfully obvious that nobody associated with this film has ever played chess nor did they bother consulting with anyone who has. I'm supposed to believe a drunk genius comes back to chess after 20 years and defeats the best players in the world when everything the characters say about chess and how they play chess is offensively incorrect. But the creme de la creme, the real cherry on top, is when a Soviet agent hypnotized our protagonist just by staring at him from the audience. He's such a good hypnotist that he can convince the genius professor to resign a winning position just by staring! So the fundamental problem is that the movie is dramatizing history. The movie isn't intended to be fantasy yet the characters are fantastical. I turned the movie off halfway through. Completely unwatchable. The whole film is lazily and poorly executed.