Review – The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

Boy did this plot fail to translate into the 21st century. The Frankenheimer original and the Condon novel upon which it was tightly based were masterpieces of cold war paranoia played out on the grand scale of national politics and in the smaller but more compelling realms of multi-dimensional characters who follow rational – or at least believable – motivations. But while the machinations of Communist powers were easy to buy (or at least consistent with the world as most Americans knew it in 1964), replacing reds with corporate baddies proves fatal to the story. Why should a big, Haliburton-esque cartel bother to put a brainwashed agent in the White House when in the real world such cabals have managed to get their own CEOs openly elected? Further, I was particularly disappointed by the brainwashing flashbacks. I didn’t expect anything as brilliant and groundbreaking as the original’s mind control nightmares, but I’d hoped for something a little more compelling than henna’d women brandishing tomatoes. And don’t even get me started on the ending. The cast was good, production quality was good, but it was all wasted on a movie that almost seemed to set itself up to fail. If this was really the movie they wanted to make, they should have packaged it as a remake of The Parallax View. See if desperate