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On
the war path
The
Manchurian Candidate
Stars Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep.
Rated MA15+
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Reviewer: PTE John Wellfare
Rating:
3 Stars
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Denzel
Washington confronts political and corporate heavyweights
in The Manchurian Candidate.
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DENZEL
Washington has plenty of experience playing a noble man in dogged
pursuit of the truth.
He may even be a little too comfortable with the role and slip
into character too easily after so many similar parts, but he
still plays it better than any other actor that springs to mind.
In the first Gulf War, a US patrol is ambushed by a large enemy
force, but fights its way out and escapes thanks to the heroism
of Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Schreiber), who is awarded the Medal
of Honour for his actions.
More than a decade later, the unit commander at the time, Major
Ben Marco (Washington), starts to believe that things had gone
differently to what he and his men remember, and begins to look
for answers. His investigations unveil a major corporation’s
plot to gain control of the government.
The Manchurian Candidate is based on a similar pretence to the
1962 film of the same name and uses many of the same characters,
but brings the concept into the modern era. It’s based
on the Gulf War instead of the Korean War, terrorist fears instead
of Communist fears and microchip implants instead of hypnotism.
In some ways, this film is at its most meaningful when compared
to the original, in terms of the political context on both occasions.
There are also a few modern-day issues such as Gulf War syndrome,
which is given a brief mention but doesn’t really feature
as much as it could.
Unfortunately, even 42 years after the original and despite
all sorts of technological advances, the brainwashing concept
still feels a little too Twilight Zone.
Director Jonathan Demme uses some similar techniques as those
that made his 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs such an eerie
experience, but the comic-like plot stops the potential effect
from taking hold.
Washington and Schreiber are brilliant in their roles, as is
Meryl Streep as Raymond’s domineering mother, but Demme
would have been wiser to bring them all together on an original
project, perhaps focussing on the aforementioned Gulf War syndrome,
rather than mad scientists and brain probes. |
