My Review of "Critical Thinking"

Critical thinking is yet another chess film out that came out in 2020. This time it's a movie not a TV series. The timing is absolutely perfect since The Queen's Gambit TV show was a real hit for Netflix recently. Since the TV series was a fictional story I thought for sure a story based on true events should be even better. In some ways it is and in some ways it isn't.

This movie starts off with the character Sedrick. It's obvious that he's from a broken home as his father seems a little down on his luck but shares the same interest in chess as Sedrick. He loses to his father in a game of chess making me think that maybe his father is going to be the key to something later on.

He's on his way to school and we get introduced to his best friend Ito. Soon we get introduced to his other fried Rodelay. They all meet up at what seems to be a remedial class. Instead we learn it's some sort of chess class taught by Mr. Martinez.

This story is basically about the whole chess team which includes 5 members. The only thing is that the movie kind of loses track of who they want to focus their attention to. It seems some of the members of the team aren't really given much shine on the screen. The major players are Mr. Martinez, Sedrick and Ito. The other characters all seem to be comic relief or to help the plot to continue.

I found that a little messy in this film. I didn't feel as much of a cohesion between the team members but the film does somewhat of a good job in keeping the pretense of the group as being a family. This is despite the fact two members have very small side stories that seem more coincidental than a brotherhood of sorts.

There are also a few areas where they made things a little too convenient but that goes with the nature of having a 2 hour runtime. Those are some of the setbacks that a director has to deal with when cutting a film. I found the introduction of each of the characters pretty interesting. However I felt the bonding moments between the players is a little lacking. It's sort of as if winning in chess is the only thing that holds these teammates together. If it weren't for that I don't know if they'd be still friends. There has to be a little more substance with their bond with one another.

Some of the chess analogies are interesting but at times there is a lot of chess jargon that just flew over my head. I don't know if this is intentional because they wanted to be accurate with real chess strategies. Oftentimes the chess explanations should have been dumbed down for the general audience. It was almost as if I was in a chess class at times. In the Queen's gambit at least they had characters in the movie that allowed the chess players to dumb it down for us the viewers. They could have added this to the movie but instead they went full out.

Although the analogies that they made were nice and all they didn't really add much to the story. I thought they were going somewhere with the material versus overall picture part of the story but they didn't go too deep into it. There were times when they'd dip their toe into that aspect of the movie but they didn't really fully commit to a true focus of what the moral of their story was.

In the end they wanted to tell you a story about a group of inner city kids that overcame all odds to become champions but I have a feeling they wanted to go a little deeper. I can see that they wanted to go a little deeper to add more meaning to the movie but there was never really any commitment to any full message that they wanted to give us.

Overall, I liked this movie but I thought it had even more potential. There are a few aspects to this movie that they touched upon but never fully committed to and it's too bad. I liked those directions but they never had the landing for those messages. I have to give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. It is an enjoyable movie and fun for all but it's not a very memorable one. Watch it if you need a little pick me up movie to get you a little more motivated.