The
Manchurian Candidate
(2004)
Rated: R
Runtime: 2 Hours and 10 Minutes
Reviewer: Dale
Grade: CIt begins promisingly enough, and now really is the time to unleash a remake of a movie that is still as surprisingly topical as the original “Manchurian Candidate” on an unsuspecting public. The movie begins with ominous visuals, a surreal twist on political partisanship and debates that could actually be something you might see on CNN one of these days. After all, the current polarized political situation is ripe for a biting satire and timely thriller like this, one that uses events like 9/11 and the rampant undercurrent of paranoia in this country to make a cracking good thriller with up to the minute undertones and some real social relevance. The film begins with edgy ideas like these…and then it seems to go to sleep.
The original “Manchurian Candidate” is still a ballsy, caustic and brilliant thriller. It’s part satire, part drama, part nail-biting suspense thriller and it’s pitch black all the way. In fact, I think it needs to get more credit. It is a movie that definitely deserves its due. When I first watched it, I was actually shocked that this film could get made in 1962. It’s so edgy and vibrant and brilliant, bustling with, what I am certain, were topical issues such as Communism and McCarthyism and paranoia and brainwashing. It still feels relevant and topical today, in fact. Would that this new version of “The Manchurian Candidate” had half the guts the original possessed. Even taken on its own terms, this new “Manchurian Candidate” inspires more yawns than shock. The plot is much the same as that of the first film: a war veteran is plagued by terrible dreams involving a Medal of Honor winner (Leiv Schreiber). In those dreams, he sees the man kill two members of their lost platoon. These dreams lead that veteran (Denzel Washington) to stumble onto a plot involving brainwashing and political intrigue and more than one murder committed on home soil. With this plot, one could definitely satirize the current political climate and craft a thriller that hits very close to home.
But Jonathan Demme seems uninterested in taking this film to the ends that it almost begs to be taken to. He seems more interested in creating a woozy, surreal movie that weaves from one odd scene to another without crafting much of a bridge. He’s great with the surreal imagery. But it would be nice if we were actually hooked by these images and involved by them, rather than just saying “That was messed up” and feeling nothing more about them. In fact, the dreamlike sequences of the movie just don’t stick with us, and that’s a problem since they make up so much of this film’s running length. Another problem is that the politics that make up such a large point of this film are so murky and hard to follow. Not only that, but they are about as much fun as sitting through two hours of C-SPAN. No, I’m not kidding. I did a lot of shuffling in my seat.
Some of the performances are quite good. Meryl Streep is passionate but woefully underutilized. Leiv is solid but still doesn’t quite involve us. He’s got some great moments here, but the performance feels less organic, less human than Laurence Harvey’s brilliant portrayal of an unlikable and rather unsympathetic yet riveting man in the original film. Leiv seems like a detached zombie for the majority of the film, which I suppose is one way to take the character, but it really doesn’t give us much of a reason to care about him. Denzel Washington is just the wrong choice, in my opinion, for the Major Marco character. He’s played this seemingly delusional crusader role so many times that there are no surprises left in it for us. We feel that we’ve seen him do this before, and we have little rooting interest in him. Not only that, but the way in which some characters in this film are brainwashed is a lot less interesting than it was in the original. In the original, the methods were simple psychological conditioning. Here we get some fanciful crap involving microchip implants and drilling into the human head (and I can’t be the only one thinking of “Ghostbusters” lines when the main character has a hole drilled into his head).
This movie pays lip service to all the issues that are being discussed in this election and I liked how the idea of terrorist cabals in this version has taken the place of the Communist threat in the original film (I feel that certain politicians use the whole vague threat of terrorism as their forefathers used the whole vague threat of Communism, and to the same ends…the only reason they get away with it is because terrorists have actually attacked us, where the Communists never really did) but the movie never really explores this idea the way you hope it will. Many such ideas are picked up and just when I got excited and thought this movie might use this fictional forum as a way to tangentially explore them, they are discarded without really being put to any good use. The film suggests interesting issues of national security and corporate political influence, and then falls back on the usual, tired plot machinations and the usual set of bad guys that every other political thriller seems to use. I was amazed at just how boring most of this film was. Maybe it would be better to someone who hadn’t seen the original, I don’t know. But the whole political landscape was put to better use in films like “Fahrenheit 9/11” or, if you prefer a fictional thriller that really goes for the jugular, “Spartan”. There are some differences and some new twists that make the plot of this one decidedly different from the original, but these new twists don’t really enhance the story being told, and they really don’t pack as much punch as the original story did.
Maybe it’s a little unfair to compare this film to the film on which it was based. Perhaps. But don’t the filmmakers bring that upon themselves as soon as they choose to remake a classic film in the first place? Just a thought. Even if the two movies were unrelated, I’d be unsympathetic to a movie that is less topical, shocking and mesmerizing than a thriller made at the height of the Cold War. A remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” isn’t a terrible idea. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s a pretty good idea. But how anyone, especially the director of “The Silence of the Lambs” can use that source material to make a film as dull as this is frankly beyond me.