Being a war hero helped him be elected to Congress and he's now a contender for the vice-presidential candidacy. His mother (Meryl Streep), a Senator, is pushing him very hard.
He resents it, but cannot seem to resist. The Manchurian Candidate (2004) For a remake, especially showing during this electioneering season, Jonathan Demme s film is pretty good. The senator purrs, seduces, and finally brutalizes a group of politicos into abandoning their choice for the VP spot and taking Raymond instead. It has been so long since I saw the original, that I was delighted to find that our local library just bought the original, recently reissued on VHS tape.
Shaw is at first glad to see him again, then sympathetic, then skeptical. The 2004 Manchurian Candidate stands as of a piece with the Bourne films and the Christopher Nolan Batman films in trying to address the moral ambiguities. What Marco is suggesting seems absurd, impossible. The Manchurian Candidate is a truly chilling look at the influence that both corporations and money can have in politics. But in his heart, Shaw knows that it might explain everything.From the Chicago Reader (March 3, 2004). Though this remake is flawed, it has more than its fair share of positives.
From its compelling premise that really hooks you in from the very beginning to the absolutely The Manchurian Candidate is a truly chilling look at. The original version of Candidate works much better on this level, building to a much more disturbing climax. As Dave Kehr has noted, the 1962 original was an audacious mix of cold war paranoia and twisted cabaret humor. To say that Jonathan Demme's 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate lacks merit, however, would be unjust. It's just frustrating to see a potentially great and disturbing political satire sacrificing compelling character development. Any remake that scuttles both had better have something good to replace them with this offers only a vague retread of anticorporate thrillers from the 70s. The story’s been updated to the first gulf war (Manchurian is now just the name of an evil conglomerate) and deprived of its major shocks (involving formal inventiveness, over-the-top dialogue, and the way the incest is presented). Oddly, it does retain some of the original’s political murkiness - the right-wing villainess (Meryl Streep) resembles Hillary Clinton - but there’s no mythic or comic payoff. If you don’t care much about the first version, or what director Jonathan Demme’s name once meant, the cast does an OK job with Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris’s routine thriller script. But the bite found in the best recent political documentaries is missing.
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