The Manchurian Candidate

I was looking forward to this film, which had a good cast and I heard some interesting reports. It wasn’t really what I had expected; I was expecting a more realistic election scandal then what was given. The story is set in the run up to a US presidential election, and the new potential vice-president is a Gulf War hero called Raymond Shaw with an influential senator as a mother (Meryl Streep), the commanding officer of Shaw, Ben Marco (Denzel Washington), is approached by another former member of his team about strange dreams, Marco realises that they are all having strange dreams about the night that Shaw saved them all, and that something else happened that they don’t remember. The reason for the discrepancies (without giving it away) was a bit to sci-fi for that type of movie, for me, which let it down.

The acting and direction is superb, and there are lots of little details that make this a good film, but I can't get round the disappointing storyline.

6.5/10