"The Manchurian Candidate"

I think you could watch the original "Manchurian Candidate" 10 times (or a hundred) and see something new every time, some small but potent glimmer that you can't believe you missed before. I think you deserve a medal -- even just a small, tin one -- if you can sit all the way through Demme's "Manchurian Candidate" once. The original is a strange and challenging work made up of dozens of ever-shifting layers; Demme's movie is one thick slab of heavy foam. And while every movie deserves to be taken on its own terms, independent of any previous work that inspired it, I felt so despondent through every frame of this second "Manchurian Candidate" that the memory of the earlier one kept invading my thoughts like a ghost army. Should any moviegoer be held responsible for a filmmaker's failure to reinvent his source material?

With his screenwriters, Daniel Pyne ("The Sum of All Fears") and Dean Georgaris (the lively, enjoyable "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"), Demme hasn't so much reinvented "The Manchurian Candidate" as he has standardized and flattened it: He's made the material safe for every American. The plot has been changed and updated, and by itself, that's not a huge problem. Denzel Washington plays Maj. Marco, who served in the Gulf War and now suffers from what he thinks is Gulf War Syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder. He has inexplicable nightmares that, he discovers, he shares with another man from his company, Cpl. Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright, in a small but intense, unnerving performance).

Melvin is much worse off than Marco. He can barely stammer out a whole sentence; he fills notebooks with clippings and drawings that focus specifically on another member of his and Marco's company: the stiff, socially inept Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), who returned from the Gulf a war hero and who has since reinvented himself as a sincere congressman. Shaw is happy in that role, but his mother, Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep), a power-mad senator, has other plans for him. She pulls strings to get him the vice-presidential nomination, which he accepts out of a sense of duty more than desire. What she's really gunning for, of course, is the presidency itself. If her plan succeeds, her son will become the first corporate-owned American president.

In this version as in the earlier one, Shaw is his sinister mother's tool. (At one point he even refers to himself as her "sock puppet.") And as Marco discovers, she's in cahoots with a huge corporation that, blob-like, has swallowed up a major portion of the United States government, and soon, it hopes, stands to own even the president.

One major problem with "The Manchurian Candidate" is that Demme seems to think that in 2004 he can swap a big corporation for the evil Communist foes of the late '50s and early '60s and still preserve the flavor and essential meaning of the original picture. He can't, simply because the first "Manchurian Candidate" isn't about anything as simple as the dangers of anti-Communism: It's a tone poem to democratic ideals, while Demme's movie is just a conventional thriller with a leaden message.

And unlike its predecessor, this new movie is almost completely humorless. In the original, the first time you see Russian and Chinese Communist baddies reinvented as polite American ladies (of color, no less) attending a garden-club meeting, you may not even believe your eyes -- the image is so outlandish that you roll with it. This time around, Washington's Ben Marco toils listlessly in search of the truth -- his frustration and torment turn him from an upstanding soldier to a blabbering bagman almost overnight. It's an earnest, sweaty performance (Washington even perspires on cue). But Demme's mission is so serious that he doesn't have time for laughs. And Marco never emerges as a character we feel anything for: He's merely a place-marker that helps move the plot along.

Next Page: Meryl Streep, the biggest flop of all

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