The Manchurian Candidate

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating * * )


The original Manchurian Candidate was very much a film of its time. So is its remake. And that's precisely its biggest failing.

The first one might feel like an artefact of the McCarthy era paranoia of the Cold War, but like Kubrick's Dr Strangelove of the same period it is a classic that still bears repeat viewings, especially for the great performances from Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury, and its twisted humour.

Adapted from Richard Condon's novel, it turned the fear of the McCarthy thought-police on its head: What if Russian and Chinese communists actually got inside all-American heads? From that sprang a thrilling assassination plot which proved all-too prescient the year after in Dallas, which cemented its place in cultdom.

No doubt director Demme and his cast thought the original was great, too - but they sure have a funny way of showing it. Demme's big-star remake is an all-too conventional thriller that can't survive the convolutions of its update.

The hypnotic communist threat is replaced by a multinational corporation, while alluding to many other American liberal conspiracy theories about big business, government, private contractors going into the war business, touch-screen voting and modern techniques of mind control.

That might sound brainy and right-on, especially with Washington in the Sinatra role of Major Ben Marco, who finds his mind playing tricks on him because of what he's told is Gulf War syndrome. But it's a plod, leavened only by its lead performances, all verging on the eccentric. Washington gets a whole new set of mental-meltdown facial expressions; Meryl Streep, as the Hillary Clintonesque mother of the vice-presidential candidate, is meant to be a political battleaxe but comes out shrill - although Schreiber, as her son, at least echoes some of the askew qualities of Laurence Harvey in the original.

The first film did defy lots of things - like logic and common sense. The second, with its earnest efforts to give a rational explanation for everything, ends up defying you to give two hoots. Hopefully, this might drive the curious back to the original - except that now the story's been ruined for them.

CAST: Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme

RATING: R13 (violence)

RUNNING TIME: 131 mins

SCREENING:Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas