A Hallmark-type period piece on the great Chess legend, "The Opera Game" is a melodramatic take on the life of "The Pride and Sorrow of Chess", Paul Morphy, the great American Chess phenom who dominated the Chess world from his pre-teens to young adulthood, defeating the best players of the United States and Europe then retiring from active play into a life of unfulfilled promise and tragedy. A made for television production the film shows its format with its faint and light laidback tone touching on Morphy's youth and dramatizations with the backdrop of the genteel sights and sounds of 19th Century New Orleans.
Alas, if only the film were truly about the great man himself. After Morphy's early successes in the U. S. A. And on the eve of his future triumphs in the Old World which further cemented his legend the viewer is dragged and plunged kicking and screaming into a quagmire of pc and woke revisionisms. Instead of depicting Morphy's dramatic and memorable encounters in Britain and France not to mention his brilliancy in Chess (that's what the film is about, remember?), the viewer is subjected to a frivolous love triangle where the Morphy portrayed is unrecognizable from the one who actually lived and a cast and a plot so pc you'd think you're watching "The Color Purple" or "Roots" instead.
If you want to make this tolerable, forget about Morphy and Chess and see this as another Hollywood crank reflecting the times. With its occasional amateur acting, lazy research, barely there accents and ubiquitous millennial agenda this passes as watchable. You've been warned.
