Review: The Manchurian Candidate

A stellar cast pulls off a mediocre performance in this sixties remake. It’s not really the actors fault, the director, writer and producers are really to blame. A farfetched story to begin with, is designed in a such a revealing way, 95% of your guess work will be shown to be correct later on. Not only that, story threads are are resolved sloppily, something you’d better steer clear off with an unbelievable story as this one. Type casting all the characters, even in the tiniest roles, is the next mistake, and that means, no suprises to be found. Then comes character interaction, another design gone awry. It feels like either a lot of scenes have been cut up, or the character just don’t behave really normal. In any case, it’s noticable.
And last but not least, Jonathan Demme delivered some nice character driven movies in the past (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia), but this event driven movie isn’t worth mentioning at all. This movie would’ve probably been best served as a direct-to-video.6-.