The Manchurian Candidate

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Maybe if it weren't for the political angle of the whole thing getting in the way, I'd give The Manchurian Candidate three stars instead of two. But it did, so I did.

Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber did a great job with their roles, and Meryl Streep was better than a lot of other actresses would have been with the cardboard role she was given. And there was some tension in the plot that often kept me on my toes. But it was pretty obvious before long how it was going to end.

And then there's the political angle. Or lack thereof.

The movie is about a "sleeper", a man who's been programmed by The Enemy, first to be the perfect candidate to get into the White House, then to "wake up" and Do Evil on their behalf. In particular, we have a decorated war hero who gets nominated for vice-president by the challenging party, with the aid of his Senatorial mother and the backing of Manchurian Global corporation. Coming out in the summer of a presidential election makes it very "timely".

But it also jumbles it all up in an attempt to be non-partisan. They never mention either major party by name. There's a line in which they describe what parts of the country the presidential challenger is going to carry, which maps pretty well to the Democrats' base, the guy that Schreiber displaces in the veep slot on the ticket is something of a liberal, and they are the non-incumbent party. I guess that makes them Democrats. Which means Schreiber is John Edwards? Except that he's a combat veteran, which makes him John Kerry. But he got put on the ticket by the connection of his political lineage, which makes him George W. Bush. Or do the connections to a corporation that gets all sorts of lucrative government contracts make him Dick Cheney?

I suppose you could argue that this genericity reflects the current state of American politics, and you'd be right. But the notion that Manchurian Global would need to program - rather than buy - a president, and by the same token could be thwarted to any meaningful extent by stopping that, makes that angle seriously naive.

If you don't care about any of that, you might enjoy this movie as a kind of emotional thriller. Like I said, Washington does a fine job as a former Army captain unraveling under the growing suspicion that his former buddy has been tampered with. But it didn't work for me.