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The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

Rated R (for long periods of intense boredom followed by disturbing images involving drills and brains.)

If you had told me a week ago that I would dislike a movie in which Meryl Streep, Jon Voight and Cotton Weary all die violent deaths, I would have said you were crazy, that no director could make a bad film in which all those people die.

But that's exactly what director Jonathan Demme has managed to do. Now I don't want to say he has no talent as a director, after all he brought us The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and has an Oscar for best director. But he missed the mark with this film.

The film is a remake of the 1962 John Frankenheimer classic. It follows the basic plot of the original, but the communists have been replaced by a large multi-national corporation.

This change is one of the major flaws in the remake. If you have to update the villain (though I'd argue that China would have worked just as well today) why not make it some nation from the Middle East? While far fetched, the idea of a foreign government subverting our nation from the top down makes at least makes for an interesting premise. The idea of a large corporation seizing the presidency to sell themselves more defense contracts and pass tax cuts for the rich just doesn't seem as gripping. In fact I'm not really sure how it's different than what they do now.

Another major problem with the remake is pacing, the movie starts at a crawl, opening with a long, rather pointless scene in which we watch different groups or soldiers playing cards (or is it the same group? I can't say I cared). It doesn't even serve to make the point that Sgt. Shaw (played by Liev Schreiber aka Cotton Weary) isn't well liked by the men. Most of the scenes move along with all the urgency of a snail. This makes the few scenes where something does happen, mostly flashbacks to the brainwashing the soldiers suffered, more disturbing than they would be in a film that actually had a pulse.

The camerawork is interesting to put it politely. 70% of this movie is extreme, unflattering, close-ups of the various actors, the other 30% is shaky hand camed footage. In fact it could have been filmed in the director's basement and we'd never notice as long as they used some stock footage of DC or New York for the scene cuts.

Denzel's performance as Cpt. Marco is good, better than Sinatra's in the original. He's a great actor, but his talent is wasted here.

Cotton Weary has all the charisma of wet cardboard. I didn't buy him as John Clark, and I don't buy him here either. I really have no idea why people keep casting him.

Streep delivers a fine performance, but her character has no dimension, she's a cliché with no redeeming quality.

There's really no reason to go see the film, It's not a horrible film, which is really too bad, because they are usually entertaining at least. My recommendation is to save yourself some money and rent the original instead.

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