Did the machine cheat?

Vikram Jayanti’s intriguing chess documentary “Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine” theorizes that the fix was in during the celebrated 1997 duel between reigning world champion Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer. Although Jayanti creates an absorbing scenario of possible corporate malfeasance engineered by a group of slide-rule wielding thugs and shadowy boardroom bullies, he fails to produce the requisite smoking pawn.

A year after defeating the big Blue in a match in Philadelphia, Kasparov squared off against his binary foe in New York City in what at that time would be the most media-saturated chess event ever. The documentary maintains that in Game 2 of the six-game set, the automaton began playing differently -- taking a more aggressive, almost human tack. Rather than simply reacting to Kasparov’s moves, it improbably appeared to have developed an endgame strategy.

The circumstances set up some delicious metaphysical themes along the man versus machine, creator versus created, “Who’s your daddy?” paradigm. Jayanti, however, doesn’t dwell on the philosophical implications so much as mount an assault on the credibility of IBM.

Kasparov is revealed to be a compelling leading man, by turns charming, arrogant and paranoid, but strangely likable. The drones behind the IBM computer on the other hand -- a group of programmers and American grand masters -- come off as smug, abrasive twits, a band of underachievers who ganged up on the class brain and stole his lunch money.

The film equates the computer’s defeat of Kasparov with the world champion’s own triumph over Anatoli Karpov in 1985. The victory by the then 22-year-old Armenian Jew was thought by many to presage the fall of Soviet Communism. IBM’s win is seen here as a darker moment in time, when the corporate empire vanquished the soul of the individual -- and cheated to do it.

The highly partisan “Game Over” ably illustrates the often-silly psychological gamesmanship that accompanies world-class chess and nearly catalogs enough circumstantial evidence against IBM to convict.

However, Jayanti’s use of some hokey tactics such as a voice whispering how much IBM’s stock jumped in the days following its victory and the intercutting of footage from a 1927 silent film about a bogus chess-playing machine thinly stretch the facts into a grand conspiracy theory worthy of “The X-Files’ ” Lone Gunmen.

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‘Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine’

MPAA rating: PG for brief mild language

Times guidelines: Abundant paranoia and twitchiness

ThinkFilm presents an Alliance Atlantis and National Film Board of Canada production. Director Vikram Jayanti. Producer Hal Vogel. Executive producers Andre Singer, Andy Thomson, Nick Fraser, Paul Trijbits, Tom Perlmutter, Eric Michel. Director of photography Maryse Alberti. Editor David Hill. Music Rob Lane. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes.

Exclusively at Laemmle’s Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd., (323) 655-4010.