A similar but even more powerful company in the film, Manchurian Global, seems have its tentacles in every part of the world economy, including journalism (exposition is often conveyed via snippets of inflammatory right-wing "news," on a cable outlet modeled on then eight-year-old Fox News Channel). In 2003, Halliburton was awarded a $7 billion, no-bid Iraq War contract even though the sitting US Vice President, Dick Cheney, had been on the company's board of directors just three years earlier. The bad guys here are more earthbound: a conglomerate that's basically Halliburton, a company that deals in engineering, petroleum, mercenary services, military prison cells, internment camps, and other goods and services related to war. The original "Manchurian Candidate" built a layer cake of anxiety and fear atop Raymond's phony war record, making him a pawn in a right-wing, McCarthy-esque scheme that somehow involved actual Russian and Chinese operatives.
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Then they'll spend a few years grooming Shaw as a Congressman, then install him as the vice presidential candidate of a major party. Their endgame is to remake Raymond, a stick-in-the-mud officer and mediocre soldier, into a Congressional Medal of Honor winner by inventing heroic details about his war service, then having the men in his unit robotically repeat them.
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Perhaps assuming that anybody seeing this movie will have already Googled the original, the filmmakers junk any pretense of mystery and quickly confirm that the abducted soldiers became pawns in a conspiracy. Ben comes to believe that something is off about his own memory of what happened overseas, and hopes Raymond can help him unlock the mystery.
For all its uncharacteristic (for Demme) visual, musical, and editing razzle-dazzle, a times verging on Oliver Stone-style sensory overload, this is another of the director's excursions into radical empathy. It replaces the original's corrosive satire with a sensitive, at times despairing portrait of people losing their autonomy, made to dance like marionettes by masters too sneaky to identify and too strong to attack head-on.ĭenzel Washington, who anchored Demme's 1993 drama " Philadelphia" and has been a familiar face in military thrillers (including " The Siege" and " Courage Under Fire"), stars as Captain Bennett " Ben" Marco, commander of an abducted and brainwashed Gulf War combat unit that included Lt. But from the opening credits sequence-a laid-back, almost documentary-styled account of 1991 Gulf War infantry playing cards in the back of an all-terrain vehicle-you can see that Demme and his collaborators aren't in this to one-up the king. Demme was filling big shoes by directing his own version of a film regarded as the great John Frankenheimer's masterpiece. Jonathan Demme's 2004 political thriller "The Manchurian Candidate," about a brainwashed war veteran who becomes an assassin, underwhelmed audiences and critics in its original run, maybe because it's a remake of a 1962 classic that had enjoyed a hugely successful re-release less than two decades earlier, vaulting it out of cult classic status and into the canon.