Chekmate was released in October 2020, but based on the dearth of information about it on IMDB, I thought I might be the first person ever to watch it. Then I found its official release on YouTube. Apparently it has a few fans. I'll never trust YouTube's thumb ratio again.

Dubb and Foxx are drug traffickers, I think. The movie's not clear on what their racket is, other than the fact that it's lucrative. We first meet them trying to collect money from some other guy. It turns into a gunfight. This scene is ultimately inconsequential. Most scenes are.

Jump to five years later. Our heroes have gone straight and work as landscapers. The money's short, so that doesn't last long. They connect with a shot-caller and get back in the dope game. A bunch of gangster shit happens. It's too tedious to summarize. The movie ends with a "TO BE CONTINUED" card. I didn't bother to click the notification bell.

Chekmate was shot mumblecore style. The dialogue seems improvised and the cast literally mumbles it. Technical problems infect every stage of the production. Most of it sounds like it was filmed inside a wind tunnel. The CGI gunshot and blood effects are awful. And hell up with the intertitles already. I'm pretty sure I would have figured out that Dubb and Foxx had gotten off work without the "AFTER WORK" card.

This thing seems to have been made mostly to promote the cast's music. That explains why so many scenes have all the sound replaced with one of their songs. It also explains one of the movie's funniest editing mistakes. During a meeting with a couple of soldiers, Dubb tries to explain what's happening in a voiceover, but the background song's lyrics cut him off mid-sentence.

The production company is officially registered in the state of Alabama as Dubb and Foxx Indrusties, so I'm not sure the misspelling in the movie's title was deliberate.

2 out of 10.

Seen on YouTube.