Storyline When his army unit was ambushed during the first Gulf War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw saved his fellow soldiers just as his commanding officer, then-Captain Ben Marco, was knocked unconscious. Brokering the incident for political capital, Shaw eventually becomes a vice-presidential nominee, while Marco is haunted by dreams of what happened -- or didn't happen -- in Kuwait. As Marco (now a Major) investigates, the story begins to unravel, to the point where he questions if it happened at all. Is it possible the entire unit was kidnapped and brainwashed to believe Shaw is a war hero as part of a plot to seize the White House? Some very powerful people at Manchurian Global corporation appear desperate to stop him from finding out.
Writers: Richard Condon, George Axelrod
Cast: Jeffrey Wright
-
Al Melvin
Pablo Schreiber
-
Eddie Ingram
Anthony Mackie
-
Robert Baker
Dorian Missick
-
Owens
Jose Pablo Cantillo
-
Villalobos
Teddy Dunn
-
Wilson
Joaquin Perez-Campbell
-
Atkins
Tim Artz
-
Jameson
Denzel Washington
-
Ben Marco
Robyn Hitchcock
-
Laurent Tokar
Liev Schreiber
-
Raymond Shaw
Antoine Taylor
-
Boy Scout #1
Joseph Alessi
-
Boy Scout #2
Raymond Anthony Thomas
-
Scout Dad
(as Ray Anthony Thomas)
Bill Irwin
-
Scoutmaster
Filming Locations: Bronx, New York City, New York, USA
Box Office Details
Budget: $80,000,000
(estimated)
Opening Weekend: $20,018,620
(USA)
(1 August 2004)
(2867 Screens)
Gross: $65,948,711
(USA)
(14 November 2004)
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Did You Know?
Trivia:
Screenwriter Daniel Pyne was paid over $1 million for his initial draft of this screenplay.
Goofs:
Revealing mistakes:
When Shaw enters his penthouse and gets the phone call from his mom we see the empty jack on the side where a phone cord should be hooked into the wall.
Quotes: Delp:
I thought you said you lost this. Ben Marco:
I bit a guy. I found another one.
User Review
A Mediocre Remake for Our Mediocre Political Times (SPOILERS)
Rating: 2/10
(SPOILERS for both the original and the remake)
This was not a bad movie on its own terms. Good cast, stylish direction
by Jonathan Demme (though now in his trademark style: huge close-ups of
people looking right at the camera), some nice suspense.
But everything – and I mean everything – that made the original
'Manchurian Candidate' an unforgettable classic has been forcibly
removed or revamped into dumbed-down mediocrity for our sped-up,
sound-bite-ridden, politicized times.
Part of the problem, indeed , is that we can't make a 1962 movie today.
We're way in the future now, and the quiet, rather straightforward
simplicity of the original could not be put on the screen today (Van
Sant tried it with his shot-by-shot 'Psycho' and it didn't work.)
So instead of beginning (after a brief prologue) with a brilliant
credit-sequence and David Amram's deeply sad and aching score, the new
one begins with a herky-jerky burst of loud rock music and a
helter-skelter barrage of images of war. It's 2004, kids, enough of
that quiet emotional crap.
From the start, the original had emotional resonance via its music and
credit portraits of the pensive lead players alone. From the start, the
new movie has no emotional resonance at all. The biggest shock is how
the emotion has been sucked out of the story, entirely.
In the original, when Raymond killed the Senator and his daughter, the
daughter was Raymond's new wife, the woman he deeply loved, the only
person in the world who might possibly save Raymond from the
pre-programmed horror of his life. Raymond's killing of those two
people was the turning point of the entire film – and filmed by John
Frankenheimer as a dazzling Wellesian cinema sequence with the symbolic
wit of the film's dark comedy (the milquetoast liberal Senator dies
shot through a carton of milk, his bleeding heart bleeding the milk of
human kindness.)
All gone now in the remake's bizarre attempt to merge the murder scene
with Raymond's great 'jump in the lake' scene from the original. The
Senator's daughter (who looks oddly like Marilyn Manson) barely cares
about Raymond anymore. His killing her is of little emotional pain.
The karate fight is gone, which means the new film is action-free, but
something else important is missing:
In the original, Raymond sees his 'houseboy,' and doesn't recognize him
as the man who betrayed and tortured him. Marco sees the same
'houseboy,' recognizes him on sight, and launches his furious payback
attack.
There was a POINT to that. Raymond was weak, controllable. Marco was
tough; his brainwashing didn't take. The contrast of tough Marco and
sneering, weak Raymond, and their bonding as fellow brainwashees, was
emotional and meaningful. The new Marco and Raymond prove, near the
end, essentially interchangeable.
The simply magnificent 'garden party' dream sequences of the original
have been removed and replaced with generic herky-jerky mind-bend
sequences (we saw just last week in 'The Bourne Supremacy.')
The wonderfully symbolic playing cards/Queen of Diamonds theme has been
replaced by the old microchips-planted-in-my-brain canard (we saw just
last month in 'The Stepford Wives.') There is no longer a visual
linkage between the Queen of Diamonds and Raymond's mother.
The wonderful trigger line: 'Why don't you pass the time by playing a
nice game of solitare?' has been replaced with a banal 'Sergeant Shaw.
Sergeant Raymond Prentice Shaw' – so that when Streep utters the words,
she had to bark them like some sort of nutcase drill sergeant (Lansbury
simply offered the chilling invitation to her son.)
Classic movies bring the right actors together in the right
combination. As good as they are, none of the four leads here –
Washington, Streep, Schreiber, Elise – make the emotional connection
that their four forbears made.
Streep is the worst, indulging her usual tics and self-referential
mannerisms to make Mrs. Shaw a one-dimensional political ogre rather
than the grand monster that Angela Lansbury was (here,the Manchurian
Global baddies look at Steep near the end as if thinking 'We hired this
idiot politician to front us?') Times being what they are, Streep will
get an Oscar and mumble speeches like "For little old me? I don't
deserve this." She doesn't.
Washington is a highly skilled actor who captures this version of Marco
well – but Sinatra's Marco was a tougher character (that karate fight)
rendered far more sad and soulful in Sinatra's best performance.
Sinatra was always a great singer of lost loves and causes – he carried
that emotion forward to his work as Marco. Washington can play tough,
but doesn't really get to, here. Washington's fierce intelligence also
neutralizes his emotional connection to the story. It's not whether
Sinatra or Washington is the better actor (both won Oscars), its
Sinatra's fitting the tale better.
Liev Schreiber has it in him to match Laurence Harvey's singular
performance in the original (so unlovable – and yet so sad; a killer
beyond his ability to control it), but the new script doesn't give
Schreiber a chance.
And yes, Rosie is explained in this movie – as a character we've seen
in 100 movies and 1,000 TV shows. The mystery is gone. Kimberly Elise
is given nothing new to play. And she is not the star -- yet -- that
Janet Leigh was when she played the role. Identification with Leigh
(right after "Psycho") was more intense.
The ending of the new film mangles the meaning of the original. The
switch of assassins requires the elimination of the tragedy of the
original, and forces a expository epilogue in the modern 'gotta explain
it all" tradition.
And the loss of Joe McCarthy, World Communism, the Chinese, the
Russians, and the Koreans in favor of gutless Hollywood PC villainy (an
evil corporation, white guys smoking cigars, and a South African white
scientist) is standard issue. We've seen this movie before – and it
wasn't 'The Manchurian Candidate.'
That the new 'Manchurian Candidate' is worth seeing at all is because
the source material is so good they can't totally wreck it, and because
the star actors are interesting enough even if they never soar where
the original took its characters.
It's a three-star movie of four-star plus material, and in destroying
virtually everything that made the original such a special film and
great classic, the new 'Manchurian Candidate' deserves a drop of at
least another star.
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