THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
½ (two and one half stars)
Remake adds little.
Running time: 130 minutes. Rated R (violence and some language). At the E-Walk, the Loews Lincoln Square, the Kips Bay, others.
WHAT, no solitaire?
Any contemporary retooling of “The Manchurian Candidate” was always going to suffer in comparison with John Frankenheimer’s revered 1962 original – arguably one of the most effective paranoid thrillers ever made.
Despite boasting a top-drawer cast firing on all four cylinders, Jonathan Demme’s update – which moves the action from the Korean War era to a post-Gulf War setting – doesn’t add much to the original, which is still capable of soaking up all kinds of timeless fears.
That said, the modern “Candidate” works well enough as a stand-alone Hollywood suspense film.
Audiences who don’t keep harking back to the twists of the first will find it a head-spinning trip with an undercurrent of cynicism and mistrust that feels in sync with the times.
And the cast really is superb.
Denzel Washington is by turns panicky and quietly befuddled in the Frank Sinatra role; and a surprisingly athletic-looking Liev Schreiber commendably fills Laurence Harvey’s shoes as a brainwashed pawn.
The magnificent Meryl Streep rips into her meaty part with a vengeance and a keen sense of humor, crunching cocktail ice like she means it and firing off salvos of derisive laughter. She’s the only actress who could dare follow Angela Lansbury’s legendary performance in the ’62 film.
Kimberly Elise is also a stand-out as Washington’s love interest (a reworking of the Janet Leigh role).
Screenwriters Daniel Pyne (“The Sum of All Fears”) and Dean Georgaris (“Paycheck”) have updated the assassination-conspiracy plot, adapted from Richard Condon’s novel, to an America where suspects are Googled, terror alerts read orange, and talk of a war on terrorism occupies the ceaseless background babble of the radio and TV news.
Demme has stripped his film of the dark humor and the creepy, clinical detachment of the black-and-white original, replacing its curiously unreal atmosphere with a more visceral mood, bloodier violence and more literal exposition.
The best example of this is the way the “brainwashing” of the returning soldiers is done via the implantation of slightly futuristic computer chips – the operating-room skull incisions are chilling, but pale beside Frankenheimer’s ingenious garden-party scenes.
No amount of No Doz can keep Capt. Ben Marco (Washington) free of the nightmares that have plagued him since he returned from a 1991 reconnaissance mission in Kuwait, just prior to Desert Storm.
He remembers a desert ambush in which he was knocked unconscious, two of his men died, and Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Schreiber) emerged a hero, earning the Medal of Honor for bravery.
Then an unbalanced member of his patrol (the always terrific Jeffrey Wright) pops up, claiming he, too, has the “dreams” and, like Marco, seems to recall the snobby Shaw as “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being” he’s ever known.
Marco needs to contact Shaw, whose war-hero status – and psychotically ambitious mother, Sen. Eleanor Shaw (Streep, whose character resembles Hilary Clinton insofar as she is a blond woman senator) – have propelled him to the forefront of a bid for the vice presidency.
As the paranoid Marco, who has been diagnosed with Gulf War Syndrome, further unravels, Shaw’s seemingly inexorable journey to the White House continues.
In order to retain the brand recognition of the title, yet get around the lack of communist bad guys, the filmmakers turn to today’s popular stand-by villain – big business.
In this case, it’s a faceless but awesomely powerful private equity fund called Manchurian Global which, in a clear allusion to Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, is accused of war profiteering.
“Candidate” sags as it wends its way toward a confused climax and finishes with a completely unnecessary epilogue.
Uniformly excellent performances keep this destabilizing tale ticking, yet one can’t help wishing Hollywood had combined this cast and these timely themes with a little bit of imagination to come up with something fresh.
Even the song playing over the credits – Wyclef Jean singing “Fortunate Son” – is a cover.