MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

REVIEWED BY BRETT WILLIS

Our rating: 3 out of 5

Because of: violence, language, left-wing politics, and a suggestion of incest

Rated:

In this retelling of the 1962 classic film, many elements have been axed and others transformed. It’s similar in many ways, but just different enough that you don’t know what’s coming. The story still revolves around the brainwashing of a U.S. military unit. But the evil deed was performed, not by Communists or a foreign power, but by a giant defense contractor called Manchurian Global (that corporate name furnishes an excuse to retain the original film title).

Denzel Washington, playing Maj. Ben Marco in the role that corresponds to Frank Sinatra’s role in the original, is entertaining as always. He at first appears as responsible, thoughtful, and in control. He was in charge of a unit in Iraq during the first Gulf War campaign; but while he was knocked out of combat, Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) took command in a heroic action that earned him the Medal of Honor. Or DID he? Some men from the unit, despite taking the mood-altering drugs prescribed by the military, are having dreams—make that nightmares—that tell an entirely different story about what happened that night. Before the film is over, Marco will become the archetypical Angry Black Man, fighting against a power conspiracy composed of white men (and one woman who may as well be a man).

Raymond comes from a long line of power-hungry politicians. If I remember right, his deceased father and his maternal grandfather were Senators, and his domineering mother Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep) now holds his father’s Senate seat. Raymond is a member of the House of Representatives; and in a backroom showdown at the party convention, his mother pushes him into the Vice-Presidential nomination. But his mother doesn’t intend for him to stop at being VICE-President...

The violence is heavy to extreme at times, depressing and creepy. People are killed by firearms, suffocation and drowning. The scenes with the unit in the brainwashing room, where some soldiers are commanded to kill others, are especially disturbing. Marco discovers an implant chip under his skin, and uses a knife to remove it. Later, he uses his bare teeth to remove a similar chip from another soldier. Raymond even has one or more implants in his brain. Without the implants or the drugs, the soldiers are controlled only by post-hypnotic suggestion (or whatever we might wish to call it). They’re not entirely free of the brainwashing’s effects, but they have a fighting chance of resisting. Will they succeed?

There are over 20 profanities, including one of more uses of f*. Still, this is mild, considering the R rating and the military and thriller theme. There’s essentially no sexual content. Marco is discreetly shown discovering the implant chip as he showers. The only unsettling content in this category comes from an interchange between Raymond and his mother. It sounds suspiciously like she got her husband “out of the way” because he wasn’t ambitious enough. Now, her son is going to accomplish what her husband could not. She gives Raymond a kiss on the lips that could perhaps pass as a normal mother-son interchange. But then she lingers, and as the camera cuts away she leans in for what looks to be an open-mouth kiss.

But what dominates the viewer’s mind (well, mine at least) is the conspiracy and brainwashing. Knowing that the film’s producers were probably liberals, I was trying to decode their agenda. The party “out of power” is the one running the conspiracy, and it sounds like the party in power is responsible for the failed foreign policy on Iraq and the unending troop commitment there. So, are the conspirators Democrats or Republicans? But maybe that’s the wrong question. Perhaps, rather than approach the film in that literal way, it should be seen as a patchwork quilt of micro-propaganda that had to be thrown together and released this summer, before the upcoming election. The Military, Iraq, big money and brainwashing are all linked together. The bad guys are conspicuously white. In the brainwashing, a black soldier is forced to murder a white soldier and vice versa.

The 1962 original had an ultra-liberal agenda. The conspirators in that version were stereotyped McCarthyite anti-Communists who were actually Communists themselves. But this version is even farther out in Space Cadet land. It makes no sense. It doesn’t work as either serious political commentary or escapism. Despite some fine individual performances, I found it neither entertaining nor thought-provoking. I sorely wished I’d gone to see The Village instead.