The Manchurian Candidate

I just caught it the other day--it was the in-flight movie on Delta's Atlanta-San Francisco flight. Not bad--but for me, the defining moment was when Denzel morphed into Robyn Hitchcock at the end.

A solid remake that stood on its own.

The last 10 minutes did seem to take forever to play out, though.

This remake, while exploring some interesting areas fails spectacularily.

I guess I saw a different movie than you guys above me.

Granted, I've only seen the film once, in a packed theater, but the more I think about it, the more I realized that it's not very good. Demme tries to branch out and make the character of Marco a little more involved, a little more bizarre, but ultimately, it doesn't work. I cared for none of the characters in the film. Streep was insanely over the top and Liev's former girlfriend, I forget her name, had no chemistry at all.

When one of the big moments in the original comes, we feel for Shaw because he's so blissfully unaware of this situation. Frankenheimer takes the time to set up some backstory and make their relationship well rounded. Demme, meanwhile, takes this same situation, jettisons the backstory other than a few mentions (as in "hey, remember when we were dating?") with his editor, and tries to make the same blissfully unaware and harsh jaw gasping moment. It falls completely on its face because we don't care for the same girl (who is in the movie, I believe, for all of 3 minutes prior) and we could care less about what Shaw does to her. I grumbled loudly in the theater when this happened because it is going for a powerful moment and making a whimper when it is finished.

That sequence sticks in my head, and I believe that the movie is overly long and the ending completely unnecessary post Madison Sqaure Garden. I guess I'm of the minority that this is not really how you should "re-invent" remakes, partly because it offers little to nothing new that the original film did, and because the film itself has some intense tonal issues that make it hard for me to even consider it a remotely well crafted film from Demme, who is also disappointing me lately.