Though this remake is flawed, it has more than its fair share of positives. From its compelling premise that really hooks you in from the very beginning to the absolutely The Manchurian Candidate is a truly chilling look at. The original version of Candidate works much better on this level, building to a much more disturbing climax. As Dave Kehr has noted, the 1962 original was an audacious mix of cold war paranoia and twisted cabaret humor. To say that Jonathan Demme's 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate lacks merit, however, would be unjust. It's just frustrating to see a potentially great and disturbing political satire sacrificing compelling character development. Any remake that scuttles both had better have something good to replace them with this offers only a vague retread of anticorporate thrillers from the 70s. The story’s been updated to the first gulf war (Manchurian is now just the name of an evil conglomerate) and deprived of its major shocks (involving formal inventiveness, over-the-top dialogue, and the way the incest is presented). Oddly, it does retain some of the original’s political murkiness - the right-wing villainess (Meryl Streep) resembles Hillary Clinton - but there’s no mythic or comic payoff. If you don’t care much about the first version, or what director Jonathan Demme’s name once meant, the cast does an OK job with Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris’s routine thriller script. But the bite found in the best recent political documentaries is missing.
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