Review of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) by Manny C — 22 Mar 2011

John Frankenheimer's 1962 feature The Manchurian Candidate is a bona fide classic, pulsing with brutal satire and riveting suspense. It's the last movie that needs a remake. So the fact that Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of the film starring Denzel Washington is actually not bad is a great pleasure. Like Frankenheimer's original, Demme's is a spellbinding mind-bender that stays true to its source material, Richard Condon's 1959 Cold War novel. There are minor updates however. Rather being under threat of Communists, as in the original film, set during the Korean War era, we're now under threat of brainwashing from powerful corporations. The climax, which sees an assassin at a political convention, is still timely. Denzel Washington stars as Ben Marco, played by the great Frank Sinatra in the original, a Gulf War vet traumatized by combat. He begins to fear that New York congressman Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), a heroic figure form his platoon, may under some kind of mind control, with the intention of being placed in the White House. His suspicions escalate when Shaw's domineering mother, Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (the great Meryl Streep, stepping into a role originally portrayed by Angela Lansbury) throws him into the running for vice president. The script has a few bumps when it begins juggling more characters than it seems capable of handling, like a liberal senator (Jon Voight) and a strange, but alluring young lady (Kimberly Elise, excellent) that Ben meets on a train. Washington is terrific, playing a man desperate, but also defenseless. And Schreiber matches him step for step as a lost boy prone to snobbish ways. And then there's Streep running with her villainous role, playing it for all it's worth, whether intimidating political cronies or giving a lustful eye to her son. Streep has never been so fierce and alluring.

Demme excellently keeps us pinned to our seats, despite a more Hollywood-like ending. Still worth watching.