Taglines: In a game of life and death… one wrong move could be his last…
Knight Moves movie storyline. They met only once, but back in 1972 David and Peter had left lasting impressions on one another, for one of them was stabbed continually with a fountain pen, leaving him with everlasting bodily scars. As for the other, his savage attack on his childhood opponent after his public humiliation and defeat was a catalyst that ended his parent’s marriage, as his father left forever; his offspring discovered his mother dying, having been slashed with a broken bottle.
This boy spent the next twenty years in and out of asylums and foster care. Now it seems he’s become one of the youngest, most successful chess grandmasters in history. Brilliant if troubled widower with a precious daughter, he suddenly finds himself a suspect in his casual lover’s murder. When more homicides occur Capt. Frank Sedman and his partner Det. Andy Wagner discover that a serial killer is at work on a Pacific Northwest island. With our chessmaster becoming more and more connected to the deaths, shrink Kathy Sheppard is brought in to figure out if this chess prodigy is as innocent as he claims to be.
Knight Moves is a 1992 American thriller film, directed by Carl Schenkel and written by Brad Mirman, about a chess grandmaster who is accused of several grisly murders. Starring are Christopher Lambert, Tom Skerritt, Diane Lane, Daniel Baldwin, Megan Leitch, Katharine Isabelle. Alex Diakun, Kehli O’Byrne and Elizabeth Baldwin.
Film Review for Knight Moves
Carl Schenkel’s thriller, “Knight Moves,” which opened yesterday, is a film that should do nothing but enhance the image of professional chess as a sport for lunatics. Or as Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert), the main character, puts itdarkly in one of the film’s many howlers, “Chess is a reflection of the world, and the world is violent.”
Peter, who knits his eyebrows in a continual scowl and speaks in a tense, slightly raised voice, is an international grandmaster who may or may not be a serial killer. In a confusing flashback, the film implies that he became unhinged as a boy after witnessing the gory suicide of his alcoholic mother. The bulk of the story is a cat-and-mouse game that Peter (and perhaps an accomplice) may or may not be playing with the police, who are investigating the murders. The mayhem coincides with an international tournament that takes place during an endless fake thunderstorm. The killings are accompanied by furious explosions of lightning and thunder.
Brad Mirman’s screenplay is so caught in labyrinthine plot twists — solving the serial killings becomes a combination of chess and anagrams played with a mysterious telephone caller — that all the other elements of the story have been patched together in lumpy cliches. The worst are given to Diane Lane as a psychologist and police consultant who, in the film’s most preposterous plot development, has an affair with the prime suspect.
“You have to face the things you feel,” Ms. Lane explains to her lover at one point. Then, backing off, she says accusingly, “This is just another game, isn’t it?”
“Knight Moves” plays so many games to keep the audience interested that when the solution is finally disclosed, it is a big letdown.
Knight Moves (1993)
Directed by: Carl Schenkel
Starring: Christopher Lambert, Tom Skerritt, Diane Lane, Daniel Baldwin, Megan Leitch, Katharine Isabelle. Alex Diakun, Kehli O’Byrne, Elizabeth Baldwin
Screenplay by: Brad Mirman
Production Design by: Graeme Murray
Cinematography by: Dietrich Lohmann
Film Editing by: Norbert Herzner
Costume Design by: Deborah Everton
Set Decoration by: Michael O’Connor
Art Direction by: Gary Pembroke Allen
Music by: Anne Dudley
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and sexuality, and for language.
Distributed by: InterStar Releasing, Republic Pictures
Release Date: January 22, 1993
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