The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

one of my absolute favorites!

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Even Denzel and Meryl could not save this remake of a classic cold war thriller. Meryl was no match for Angela Lansbury, and Denzel did not ring true in his role, originally played by Frank Sinatra. Lawrence Harvey was outstanding in the original and Schrieber while looking like Harvey was not equal to him. The major flaw though was changing who the bad guys were. In 1962, the Cold War was in full swing and brainwashing by the Chinese Communists was very real. The story does not translate well by updating the time frame.

I made the big mistake of watching the black and white original 1962 movie, starring Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey and Angela Lansbury not long before watching this latter-day remake. That John Frankenheimer - directed film is comfortably in my top 10 all-time movies, while it's fair to say that this Jonathon Demme version isn't.I allowed all the licence I could to the new film while watching it, from the awkward way they got the original title, so naturally important and relevant to the original, into the plot here, to the other changes in the narrative and roles of the main players, but the fact of the matter is that this feature has nothing like the original's sense of pace, drama, suspense or excitement. Even the scene-setting first shot, of Denzel Washington's Captain Ben Marco's character's troop of carousing young Desert Storm soldiers takes an age to move on to a shot of Liev Schreiber's Raymond Shaw sitting apart from them, both shots however hardly demonstrating the former's disdain or loathing for him or his alienation from them. The effect of this is to undermine their later pre-ordained litany of admiration for him after he's awarded the Congressional Medal Of Honour for his miraculously rescuing them (or did he?) when they're all ambushed.It doesn't improve from there. For me the most memorable scene from the earlier movie was the masterly way the brainwashing scene and its attendant slaughters of the innocents was chillingly but imaginatively realised. Here it's done in a much more confusing and slapdash way, incorporating images of the faces of tribal females for reasons I couldn't decipher. Shaw's romance with Jocelyn Jordan is played down so much that it significantly reduces the impact of her and her father's later demises, again unlike the shocking double-sequence in the original.Listen, I could go on and on, detrimentally comparing and contrasting the new against the old, but even if the later film had appeared as an original work, I'd still have struggled to work up enthusiasm for it. The casting here is uninspired too, Washington appears suitably confused throughout, Meryl Streep phones in her trademark unsurprising "Iron Lady" performance, the casting obviously forgetting about the devastating impact of Angela Lansbury's casting against type previously, while Schreiber seems content to just copy Lawrence Harvey's playing as if he's over-studied the part.The climax at the party convention, like so many others in this film, was so played out it lost any prospect of achieving a nail biting finish. One of the binding factors in the earlier movie was its topicality, especially as the Kennedy assassination followed so soon after its release, whereas here the events played out seem too fantastic and contrived to in any way convince the viewer that something like this could have happened now.Really, this is a very poor remake of a very good film and I urge anyone who watched this movie, whether they liked it or not to look out that original. I promise you that you won't be disappointed.

Have you seen it? No? There is likely a very good reason for that...it stinks.Like nearly ALL the endless remakes and reboots that have been plaguing movie goers for the past decade or so....all this is, is a heartless version of the original.It has no heart.It has no soul.It is a retelling of a film that we all love and cherish...and it adds nothing to the story. It improves nothing but the special effects--which held up very well over time--and in some cases belittles the fans of the original...particularly in the fact that they remade the movie at all, without adding anything clever to it.Like so many other remakes it is a hallow shell of the original.

I haven't seen the original Sinatra movie, but for me this movie presents quite a solid story with quite a few unpredictable surprises along the way at some of the most unpredictable spots. A political thriller at most, this movie walks on one of the most classic assassin plot lines; an able man being brain-washed into being an effective assassin and another who tries to rid him from the brain-wash grasp. What I like is the twists and turns particularly the ones near the movie's ending where the seemingly protagonist and the puppet switch places for a moment. The overall acting is quite nice. Denzel Washington is as always able to live up the mystery driven character of Bennett Marco. Liev Schreiber also did well enough in portraying the steadfast man that's yet confused about his past. Having Jon Voight and Meryl Streep really help in putting the seriousness into the story.