So. The remake of The Manchurian Candidate.

Is it as bad as this Wiki entry implies?  Yes, I understand that it got some award nominations at the time, but it was done in 2004, which not coincidentally was a period where Bush Derangement Syndrome was rapidly spreading through the self-appointed arbiters of our culture.  Sinatra’s The Manchurian Candidate is one that I am extremely fond of; so I have no real desire to kick through my TV screen out of sheer nerdrage if I can avoid it by simply never watching the remake.

6 thoughts on “So. The remake of The Manchurian Candidate.”

  1. It really is that bad.

    Don’t watch it. It’s a terrible remake.

    Your time is much better spent rewatching the original.

  2. Let me put it this way. I spent about two years, all told, watching every single spy film I could find while writing Night’s Black Agents.

    I didn’t watch the Manchurian Candidate remake.

  3. I would never recommend watching it. It’s not as clever as it thinks it is.

    I recall some bit near the end where there is a red state/blue state map and there was one state that wasn’t decided (Louisiana, as I recall), which the script drew attention to, but it was irrelevant as the election was already decided. Nor did the script decide that such thing should get resolved in any fashion later on.

  4. I don’t think it’s as bad as all that. The main problem I have with it is that it is both so thoroughly professional and so thoroughly unnecessary. Slick, disposable entertainment. It has to invent a fictitious corporation to justify the title, because obviously it’s not going to incorporate the Red Scare elements of the Sinatra classic. Really, Jon Voight and (surprisingly) Liev Schreiber are the big reasons to watch…Denzel is phoning it in, and Meryl seems to think that her Hillary character is based on Karen Hughes. You could safely give it a miss.
    That red-blue map that Tom mentioned, by the way, is a source of great pleasure for me — and may make me remember the movie more fondly than it deserves. (No real spoilers follow.) It’s a pretty bizarre map, but if you look at it closely and conjoin it with some comments that Meryl Streep’s character makes early in the movie, I think it’s pretty plain that the winning ticket is the Democratic one, and that Streep’s character is a corporatist Democrat. Then I think of Hillary, and I just get lost in smiles.

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