Critical Thinking

“When a true story is all a movie has going for it, why drown it in schmaltz?”

Title: Critical Thinking (2020)
Director: John Leguizamo 👨🏽🇨🇴🇺🇸
Writer: Dito Montiel 👨🏽🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 2.5/5

In John Leguizamo’s second film made from the director’s chair, his first being 2003’s HBO movie Undefeated, audiences follow a true story about underestimated teens from Miami who made it all the way to the U.S. National Chess Championship in 1998.

These inspiring events need no embellishment nor bombast, yet Critical Thinking packs in applause lines accompanied by sentimental orchestra—or obvious hip hop beats for “street” scenes—giving off a general sense of being airlifted from the 90s, with no revisions for today’s viewers who may have already seen their share of movie mentors who champion inner city kids. It helps that Leguizamo, a Colombian-American, is telling a Latin American story. But authentic storytelling doesn’t shake off the dust bunnies that perch within the cracks of Critical Thinking’s many plot threads and character arcs.

Still, the craft Leguizamo has already perfected over the course of decades—acting, that is—remains intact. In his starring role as chess coach Mr. Martinez, Leguizamo delivers as strong a performance as the confined script allows for. In fact, Critical Thinking succeeds best through the earnest deliveries of its cast members. In contrast, other attributes like handheld camerawork and forced devices, such as the cheesy countdown clocks meant to instill urgency, leave the film with a cloying TV-movie vibe.

Gender: 2/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Women find little to no space in this film, crowded out by a robust cast of six leading characters, all of them men. Women do appear in supporting roles, however.

Principal Kestel (Rachel Bay Jones) starts off as the antagonistic administrator of frustrating policies, which value programs like football over Mr. Martinez’s chess club. But even though she eventually comes around to supporting the team, and represents the way a group of underdogs can change the hearts and minds of traditionalists around them, the changes we see in Kestel feel purely circumstantial. No indication of personal transformation occurs, as she merely reacts to the team’s successes. Sure, she secures them a few resources, like chocolate bars the students can sell to raise funds. But she never compromises a single dollar of her own to help get them there, unlike Mr. Martinez who empties his own savings account to get the students to and from competitions.

The only other woman who appears more than once involves Chanayah (Zora Casebere), the girlfriend of one of the chess players. She provides emotional support and has no life of her own, as we never see her interact with anyone outside of her boyfriend or his friends and father.

Race: 4.75/5

Normally, a film spearheaded by Latinx and Black talent, both in front of and behind the camera, would fly through this category. But due to thin writing, everyone feels one-note and even borders on stereotype.

For example, Critical Thinking finds its villain in Donny (Ruben E. A. Brown), a Dominican gangbanger who guns down an immigrant student in a move that comes from nowhere and stings like a slap to the face when it happens. Donny’s lackey, the slouching and Black twenty-something named Pickle (Isaac Beverly), feels just as flat and antagonistic.

Neither are the film’s heroes afforded complexity. Cuban-American Mr. Martinez feels sainted as an all-knowing “tough love” mentor. And while that may be perfectly true in real life, the goodness is hard to believe without the humanizing contrast of a single flaw in his perfect facade.

Meanwhile, the students tumble together in a blur of pencil sketches, none of them explored with any lasting depth. They’re generally cast true to their backgrounds—such as Ito Paniagua played by Dominican actor Jorge Lendeborg Jr. or Marcel Martinez played by Cuban actor Jeffry Batista—but the film still falls short of revealing anything more than its skin-deep tagline of inner city high schoolers pulling themselves up out of difficult circumstances to accomplish something wonderful.

When it comes time to do the harder work, of either critiquing the flawed infrastructure that has disadvantaged these Miami Jackson high schoolers, or narrowing its scope to dive into the psyches of a few characters, Critical Thinking squirms away in favor of ending on an easily digestible win.

Mediaversity Grade: C 3.08/5

I don’t want to take anything away from the real chess champions who went on to show the country that they’re so much more than their zip codes or last names. But perhaps that’s why Critical Thinking disappoints, as it yanks up the parking brake short of where interesting conversations about Latinx and Black teenagers are taking place onscreen today. TV shows like On My Block, Gentefied, Vida, or Marvel’s Runaways put their longer formats to good use and poke holes in preconceived notions about this demographic, leaving Critical Thinking looking outdated with its time-constrained generalizations.

At the end of the day, however, the movie has accomplished the foundational work of providing jobs and work experience to filmmakers and actors of color, while giving Latinos the chance to tell their own stories. But as I sat through rote emotional beats, I couldn’t help but think Critical Thinking would have been so much more powerful as a documentary. When a true story is all a movie has going for it, why drown it in schmaltz?

Like Critical Thinking? Try these other titles featuring Cubans or Cuban-Americans.

Grade: CLiMarch 24, 2020