THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

Channel 4

Jonathan Demme's remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 thriller is updated to the Gulf War, with Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) as a member of a patrol saved by Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber). Shaw was awarded the Medal of Honor and is now standing for vice-president under the stern eye of his controlling mother Eleanor (Meryl Streep) but unlike the original, she isn't a pawn of the communists but of big business, who want their own man in the White House. Marco, however, keeps having disturbing nightmares and discovers he is being controlled not by brain-washing but by implanted chips. As he attempts to unravel the mystery and stop Eleanor's plot, so she is equally determined her son will not be stopped.

Demme wisely reveals that Marco is being controlled fairly early on in the film, assuming his audience is intelligent enough to have seen the original film, but writers Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris include enough new secrets whose revelation offers new plot twists and the ending isn't a direct copy of the original. Washington and Schreiber take on the roles originally played by Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey but it is Streep who steals the film in the role originally played by Angela Lansbury. It was rumoured she modelled the character on Hillary Clinton but Streep herself has only mentioned Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney as she assumes an air of superiority rather than rabid dogmatism. Overall, Demme's film is one of that rare breed - a re-make that stands on its own feet - and given the exploits of Enron and recent financial collapses in America, the premise of big business needing a stooge in the White House rings alarmingly true.