The Manchurian Candidate Review

by David N. Butterworth (dnb AT dca DOT net)
August 18th, 2004
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2004 David N. Butterworth

*** (out of ****)

    Behind every decorated Gulf War veteran with an implant in his back there's
a mind-controlling mother of a congressman with a nefarious hidden agenda. Jonathan Demme's attention-grabbing remake of the John Frankenheimer classic stars Denzel Washington in the Frank Sinatra role (as Ben Marco, the military man who returns from Kuwait haunted by a recurring nightmare that he learns other survivors of his unit are also having), Liev Schreiber as the Congressional
Medal of Honor bearing Raymond Prentiss Shaw (Laurence Harvey in the original),
the man who reportedly saved Marco's company and who is now running on the Vice
Presidential ticket, and the redoubtable Meryl Streep as Raymond's
emasculating
mother Eleanor Shaw who will stop at nothing to see her son appointed to the White House (a tough act to follow this, what with Angela Lansbury receiving an Academy Award® nomination for her performance back in 1962). Since the screenplay
for Demme's film is based on the screenplay for Frankenheimer's film (which itself was based on the novel by Richard Condon), it's no surprise that the two films are quite similar, with a lot of the obvious updates (the war in Korea
to the war in Kuwait, communist Chinese Manchuria to the Manchurian Global Corporation,
and so on). But time and distance have diluted the story some; what was chilling
and shocking back then seems almost commonplace nowadays (especially the question
that our elected officials might actually have something between the ears). "The Manchurian Candidate" is, as you'd expect, slickly made and classily acted
but it has neither the subtlety of the original nor the intensity rendered by its stark black and white.

--
David N. Butterworth
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