The manchurian candidate rotten tomatoes
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It represented a new psychological twist in spy movies, playing upon widespread fears at the time that American POWs in Korea were being systematically brainwashed. The film, based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon and directed by John Frankenheimer, gained an almost cult-like following. The plot is about a Chinese conspiracy to " brainwash" an American POW into becoming an unwitting assassin of a candidate for President of the United States and thus allowing a villain to become President. (As is now well known, no one can be hypnotized against his will, and hypnosis cannot make anyone violate his conscience.) Hypnotic is anything but.The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 Hollywood film based on the idea that hypnosis could produce a man involuntarily programmed to commit murder, an idea popular at the time but now thoroughly discredited.
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It’s hard to care what happens to her or anyone else in the film, even harder when you slowly figure out that no one involved seems to care either. Siegel, who was so effective in Hush (a thriller made more terrifying by a protagonist who responds to jeopardy with speedy ingenuity), is as soap-level as the film and actors around her here, a thankless vacation from her far more refined, or at least entertaining, work with Flanagan. Directors Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote fail to make a single imaginative choice, despite the Hitchcockian potential of the conceit, and are instead content to make the film look like it’s playing on a loop in the reception of an office building: bland and lifeless.
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The first draft script relies on too many instances of supposedly smart people acting like certified morons to advance the plot, an eye-rolling set of bad decisions that would seem absurd in an 80s slasher let alone a film that appears to be taking itself more seriously. What’s frustrating is that D’Ovidio also scripted 2013’s incredibly diverting Halle Berry thriller The Call, a far more enjoyable woman-in-peril thriller that kept us perched seat-edge, wringing fun from its knowingly b-movie setup.īut there’s zero, nay negative, fun to be had here, a potentially interesting, if not exactly original, sub-Manchurian Candidate idea (pre-programmed victims/accomplices are activated by a phone call) taken nowhere of interest. Writer Richard D’Ovidio plays his cards so early that there’s barely any gas left in the engine for the remainder of his film. O’Mara’s evil shrink is so clearly an evil shrink that the only big mystery is why anyone would agree to spend a moment alone in a room with him. It’s one that then lingers for the next, at least mercifully short, 88 minutes, as things go from bad to worse to worser. She awakes refreshed but a chain of events soon makes her realise that Dr Meade’s intentions might not be as noble as she thought.Īfter a laughably ineffective red flag of a cold open that takes a theoretically scary concept (what if you thought the walls of an elevator were closing in to crush you to death) and makes it practically incompetent, we’re then cursed with the sinking feeling that we’re about to watch a real bad movie. Jenn is reluctant at first but relents and agrees to go under. At her best friend’s house party, while trying to dodge her ex-boyfriend, she meets dashing hypnotherapist Dr Meade (Jason O’Mara), who offers a way through her inertia. It stars Kate Siegel – something of an in-house Netflix player having starred in her husband Mike Flanagan’s ‘Haunting of’ anthology shows as well as Gerald’s Game and Hush which she co-wrote – as Jenn, a thirtysomething woman struggling to get her shit together. A low budget does not, of course, have to mean low effort but it’s hard to see where any of the energy is here, making it impossible to muster up any as one watches – a film about being put to sleep that sends us there too.
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THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE ROTTEN TOMATOES TV
It’s the kind of half-assed slop that has sadly come to dominate much of the streamer’s original film content, slapdash TV movies made on the cheap and trucked out in mass for an audience who have now come to expect and accept such subterranean quality as the norm.