3/10

USA 2004 : Jonathan DEMME : 130 mins

What on earth has happened to Jonathan Demme? This dog's-breakfast version of The Manchurian Candidate is his second duff remake in a row - if anything, it's even less bearable than The Truth About Charlie as it wastes a better cast (peerless Jeffrey Wright doesn't make that many films to begin with) and represents an absolute howler of a missed opportunity.

Thus the emphatically Dubya-ish Senator Iselin is erased from the scene: the 'candidate' this time is none other than the 1962 version's assassin-figure, Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber in the old Laurence Harvey role), a youthful individual promoted unexpectedly onto a general election ticket in the vice-presidential position, a la Dan Quayle. Shaw's mother remains on the scene - though the incest subtext of the original now feels arbitrarily tacked on. And Instead of the Machiavellian behind-the-scenes machinator Angela Lansbury, we get Meryl Streep (gamely rising above the script's limitations much like Glenn Close in the recent Stepford Wives redo) as a New York Senator who looks and sounds unmistakeably like current New York Senator Hillary Clinton.

Ah yes, the internecine squabble this time is among Democrats, offering to protect America with their "Secure Tomorrow" slogan in the wake of what's passingly referred to as "Black Friday" (i.e. 9/11?) We also hear tantalising but undeveloped background reports of a global "terror war" being fought by "beleaguered US troop deployments worldwide" - which involves dropping bombs on the African state of Guinea. Not all Democrats are convinced by the Streep-Schreiber position: "We can't clean up the world with dirty hands" notes Jon Voight, stepping into the voice-of-reason shoes previously occupied by John McGiver.

The likes of Paul Verhoeven might have given the material a crazily energetic/prophetic spin, but in these hands none of it makes a great deal of sense: leaving aside the topical relevance or lack thereof, the film doesn't even work on its own terms as a paranoid-conspiracy thriller in the mould of The Forgotten. Demme and his scriptwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Gorgaris clumsily strip away all the nifty little details that went a long way to making the Frankenheimer film memorable: they contrive to dispense with the whole solitaire/Queen-of-Diamonds triggering mechanism in favour of a very dull alternative (saying the brainwashed person's full name?), and also somehow manage to royally screw up the key brainwashing flash-backs.

Their alterations to the basic story - with dogged Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) trying to work out the byzantine plot revolving around his former commanding-officer Shaw is somehow implicated - are daft in the extreme, plodding pacelessly to a confusing, incoherent finale that's conspicuously lacking any form of tension. Instead of Frankenheimer's implausible but giddily entertaining satire, we have an even more implausible but dourly pointless "thriller" - one which may lead some to wonder whether Demme and his scriptwriters may themselves have been under the remote control of nefarious, malevolent schemers.

25th December, 2004
[seen 10th November : Odeon Gate, Newcastle : press show]