I love Khabensky as an actor and I've seen many of his movies, I know what he's capable of but this one doesn't give him a lot of time or freedom for that matter to truly shine. His character is unlikable almost from the start and we as viewers are fed with hate toward him almost immediately and given what the creators of this movie intended to show it's understandable: they needed a villain, a certain opponent to Yankovsky's Karpov who turned out to be just as unlikable but for the whole different set of reasons.
The main issue with Champion of the world is that it's a caricaturistic one-dimensional bleak movie that's built on pseudo-patriotic feelings toward a true "champion" and animosity toward the bad guy, a defector, a traitor and an immoral person in general. But what actually happened to this "bad guy" to turn him into one? We will never know because we are only given the fact of his "badness" and are supposed to accept it as is. OK, but what about the good guy then? Are we given any reason to like him and empathize with him? Strike two.
Yankovsky is either a bad actor or he just presented Karpov as unemotional, cold and robotlike person whose only passion is the game and he's only in it to win it - it still doesn't make him any less of a villain to me. What's the point of screaming and shouting or sheding a tear if it's made with no effort of emotions? Khabensky was in contast more versatile and interesting to observe but the crazy persona he adopted from the script wouldn't allow me to enjoy his performance just as much.
The visual effects are great though, both the title sequence and the visualization of the matches were done beautifully, with perfect coloring and music which was overall pretty fitting except for a couple of scenes.
In the end this movie is a great example of why I don't watch russian movies that often. All about it screams patriotism, screams this is right and that is wrong, it doesn't give you any options to choose from, to interpret these and those things which is the worst way possible to make a movie. It has no antagonists, no protagonists, just some wooden characters, the conflict and the way to resolve it, it might as well just be a textbook of facts and figures and it could have been way more entertaining this way.
