Critical Thinking
If you settle in to watch a movie about a coach and a team of misfit students from a disadvantaged high school, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. Critical Thinking delivers the uplifting arc required, with the twist that the “sport” at hand is chess, and the students are African-American and Latino boys who look nothing like the privileged preppies who dominate youth chess competitions.
John Leguizamo picked this true story, which had been kicking around for 20 years, as his first feature film as director. He also plays the coach, Mario Martinez, whose elective chess class attracts a lot of castoffs. Four students are competition-level players, and off they go to local, regional, etc., contests. The rest you can guess.
The script is functional, with subplots for some of the players — although surprisingly little for Martinez, aside from his tensions with the hard-shelled white school principal (Rachel Bay Jones), who initially declines to fund the team’s travel. The students get a bit more context: One has a nasty, chess-obsessed father (Michael Kenneth Williams, The Public); another gets involved with a local drug dealer. A late-arriving fifth team member, a Cuban refugee, is a chess prodigy who can play four games simultaneously without looking at the actual boards.
Some knowledge of chess is helpful here, especially in one engaging classroom scene when Martinez recounts a famous 19th century game move by move, but Leguizamo manages to keep tension high in the competition scenes without depicting much of the actual play. It’s all in the youths’ faces, both the heroes and the countless briefly glimpsed players they battle.
That’s this movie’s main strength. The young cast members are intense and sympathetic, and there’s not a weak link in the main cast. The script may get choppy — some subplots are left dangling — but the actors keep the viewers on their side throughout.
Critical Thinking doesn’t delve deeply into the socio-economic disparities that it surfs. Mostly it’s just a satisfying high school sports movie translated into chess idioms, and it doesn’t aspire to suggest that the competitions do much more than build self-confidence and friendships. Somehow that’s enough.
Since the story is set more than 20 years ago, the obligatory “here they are now” photos in the final credits are especially revealing, and I would encourage Googling after viewing, since there’s a lot more to Martinez’s story than is contained in the movie. That’s also to Leguizamo’s credit: The movie could easily have focused on the coach and it does not. It’s about the kids, and that’s refreshing.
Grade: B. Not rated, but PG-13 equivalent, for a couple flashes of violence and adult language. Now available via the Pop-Up Grail streaming service.
Photo: Vertical Entertainment
