Denzel Washington, who anchored Demme's 1993 drama "Philadelphia" and has been a familiar face in military thrillers (including "The Siege" and "Courage Under Fire"), stars as Captain Bennett "Ben" Marco, commander of an abducted and brainwashed Gulf War combat unit that included Lt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber). Ben comes to believe that something is off about his own memory of what happened overseas, and hopes Raymond can help him unlock the mystery.
Perhaps assuming that anybody seeing this movie will have already Googled the original, the filmmakers junk any pretense of mystery and quickly confirm that the abducted soldiers became pawns in a conspiracy. Their endgame is to remake Raymond, a stick-in-the-mud officer and mediocre soldier, into a Congressional Medal of Honor winner by inventing heroic details about his war service, then having the men in his unit robotically repeat them. Then they'll spend a few years grooming Shaw as a Congressman, then install him as the vice presidential candidate of a major party.
The original "Manchurian Candidate" built a layer cake of anxiety and fear atop Raymond's phony war record, making him a pawn in a right-wing, McCarthy-esque scheme that somehow involved actual Russian and Chinese operatives. The bad guys here are more earthbound: a conglomerate that's basically Halliburton, a company that deals in engineering, petroleum, mercenary services, military prison cells, internment camps, and other goods and services related to war. In 2003, Halliburton was awarded a $7 billion, no-bid Iraq War contract even though the sitting US Vice President, Dick Cheney, had been on the company's board of directors just three years earlier. A similar but even more powerful company in the film, Manchurian Global, seems have its tentacles in every part of the world economy, including journalism (exposition is often conveyed via snippets of inflammatory right-wing "news," on a cable outlet modeled on then eight-year-old Fox News Channel).
The film loses suspense and mystery by giving us the essence of the conspiracy up front, but it gains dramatic power. Front-loading the plot lets Demme concentrate on what happens to the major characters psychologically and emotionally while they try to verify what they already suspect, then expose the wrongdoers. It's a rough, often tragic road. Ben is a working class guy who—like the other survivors of a unit decimated by suicides and mysterious deaths—seems to be drifting, enduring the same scary dream each night. Raymond is living a more posh, shielded life. He's the only son of former senator Eleanor Prentiss (Meryl Streep, channeling Hillary Clinton by way of Lady Macbeth), and has been groomed since birth to do his mother's bidding—but he's a wreck with a pasty, sad grin, impersonating a man who can make small talk at a party without wanting to throw up.
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