THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE remake offers a twist on the paranoid thriller. It's a hippie paranoid thriller. Unfortunately, the hippie element so intrudes on the paranoid element that I had difficulty discerning whether the film wanted me to gnaw my fingernails, laugh out loud, or just peace out, man.
While the film hits many of the beats of the original, it also takes time to tap on pretty much every board of the Democratic Party's then-current platfom. From the Prescription Drug Benefit to Halliburton to G.W . Bush himself, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE sets 'em and knocks 'em down, one after another, to such an extent that it actually becomes a distraction. I mean, c'mon, Al Franken as a nightly news reporter?
That's not to say that THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE doesn't have anything going for it. Jeffrey Wright is, as usual, phenomenal; Denzel Washington is, as usual, so good that we don't notice how good he is; and Liev Schrieber makes me wonder why the hell that Mr. Clark movie never happened. None of them, however, are a match for Meryl Streep. Not only does she blow every one of them off the screen, but I bet that when this thing was running in the multiplexes, she blew everyone in all the other movies off their screens, too. She's evil, she's creepy, she's smothering, and she is 31 different flavors of awesome.
While THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is a bit slight and more than a bit hamhanded, it's worth watching for Streep's performance alone. And who knows? Maybe the hippies are right.
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