Was the Manchurian Candidate remake better thanthe original

I didn't see the second one, but I really liked the original.

Also, the original came out in 1962, on the heels of the Cold War and the decade of paranoia and would have been relevant to the times.

The second one seems like a gimmick to me. And I don't think Meryl Streep could pull off an evil character. Whereas Angela Lansbury was excellent.

No, but it is a decent remake.

No

5/10

I've never seen the original, but I thought the remake was rather ludicrous.

I disliked it so much I more than doubled the length of my usual capsule reviews in a sort of stream-of-consciousness rant.

This is one of the more depressing of the current rash of remakes that have come down the line. It is totally unnecessary as there is nothing about the original that needs “updating.” Critics have been praising the various riffs on the 1962 masterpiece. My own Dallas Morning News gave it an A- grade while praising it oxymoronically as “a popcorn movie that gives you something to think about.” Yeah, it made me think about Frank Sinatra and John Frankenheimer. I am totally flummoxed, bamboozled, bemused, bewitched, bothered and bewildered by these positive reviews. Rather than the tightly controlled original, Demme’s remake is a meandering, slow moving mystery about a corporate attempt to control the U.S. government. It is full of “paranoid thriller” clichés. The one that sent me out to the men’s room involved Bruno Ganz who plays an old friend of Denzel Washington. Denzel visits Bruno’s lab for scientific information. The next time Washington goes there, he finds the building cleaned out. Ganz and all of his equipment and lab animals are gone. ‘Fraid I saw that coming. See, the bad guys are so powerful they can make people and their whole lives just disappear. At least, I think it was the bad guys. This event is immediately forgotten and never mentioned again so I don’t really know what happened. Denzel Washington does OK. Liev Schreiber is an interesting actor who can enliven even dreary comedies like “Kate And Leopold,” but he is colorless in this screenplay. Meryl Streep takes the Angela Lansbury role but only succeeds in reinforcing how great Lansbury was. Streep is at her most actorly. There is never one second when you are not aware that you are watching Meryl Streep acting. Here’s Meryl Streep acting devious. Now Meryl Streep is playing the part of a powerful political figure. Now we are seeing Meryl Streep playing a domineering mother. Almost every attempt at “updating” and “reimagining” is a failure. The brainwashing scenes have the same kind of fragmented editing that we have seen a gazillion times to express a movie character’s disorientation. When Raymond is sent to assassinate Senator Jordan, the result is a staging so lame that I suspect Demme must have intentionally drawn back so as to not even invite comparisons to Frankenheimer’s achievement of one of the saddest and most shocking and memorable images ever filmed. And, yes, the ending is changed from 1962, but any shock that comes from the supposed twist is in realizing the extent of this new dastardly plot relies on knowledge of the older film. Hey, it’s not going to happen the same way! This is really cheap and easy. Demme’s “Manchurian” is a truly bad movie in so many ways. Taken on its own merits, it is just a second or third tier summer time-waster. But it even made it over this low bar on the basis of being a remake of a much, much greater film whose sandals it is not fit to untie.