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"Sgt. Shaw? Sgt. Raymond Shaw? Raymond Prentiss Shaw?"

Much has been made of the theory that Meryl Streep, inheriting Angela Lansbury's mantle of The Manchurian Candidate conniving politician materfamilias, would be aping Hillary Clinton in a bit of subtle election year trickery. It's not true, though it would have made an interesting addition to this disappointingly poker-faced remake, which turns John Frankenheimer's brilliant 1962 satire into a confused, convoluted paranoiac thriller. How odd that the people who had the savvy to bring Streep into this timeless (but updated!) role didn't insist on a screenplay that feels more alive.

The original film had a simple but inspired agenda: to feed on the American public's Korean War fears of mind control and invasion by communist forces and combine that with post-McCarthyist cynicism about the government. This one, relocated to the Gulf War, has nothing so concrete to latch onto, and winds up everywhere at once, an attack on the war profiteering tactics of Halliburton and its ilk, on our media and its rampant lowest-common-denominator generalizations, on power politics and the total lack of space for honesty and humanity, on "privately owned and operated" public servants.

That's ambitious; I respect ambition. Follow-through is even better, though, and The Manchurian Candidate is too busy constructing a labored genre plot to bring its themes to completion. It tinkers with the structure of the first film, combining the Laurence Harvey and James Gregory characters into one -- war hero and budding vice presidential candidate Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) -- and makes Frank Sinatra's Major Bennett Marco a typically panicky why-won't-anyone-believe-me crusader played by Denzel Washington. Even the immortal "why don't you pass the time with a game of solitaire" trigger line is replaced by something considerably less quirky and creepy. No expense has been spared to turn this into a perfectly conventional, perfectly inoffensive mainstream thriller.

Being quite familiar with the course of the plot, I found little of this useful. A viewer seeing this material for the first time may be engaged on a superficial level, but I doubt anyone will find the sort of genre-bending transcendence that Frankenheimer brought to the then more topical Richard Condon novel. Maybe that's fundamentally unfair -- a movie can be viewed on its own terms, after all, and comparisons to classics rarely seem to reflect well on new films. But it's impossible for me to have a tabula rasa view of how this Manchurian Candidate would play sans the existence of its predecessor, but when I see that so much good has been surgically excised, it becomes difficult to look upon the new film impartially, never mind kindly.

As I said, I can't comment fairly on the merits of Jonathan Demme's film in a vacuum, but to be honest, I don't think it's very good in any case. As a mainstream thriller it fails because it lacks an engaging protagonist -- Washington's Ben Marco goes through all the everyone-thinks-I'm-crazy motions without ever doing anything interesting of his own volition. Jon Voight pops up about halfway through as Meryl Streep's scrupulous Senate rival, and I liked his character and performance so much that I wished that Washington would go away and that the movie would follow Voight around instead. That desire quickly becomes moot, but the point stands: for the vast majority of the time, there's nothing for the audience to do but stare dully at the screen.

This is generally not the case whenever Meryl Streep shows up. Her performance is so interesting, so nuanced, so strong, so unusual, that she leaves everyone and everything else in the dust. She is perhaps the film's sole fulfilled ambition -- casting her was shooting for the stars (though perhaps not a very risky gamble), and she comes through in a big way. Her presence makes the movie consistently watchable, but one gets the feeling that it would have made more incisive material positively riveting.

It's unclear, at the end of the day, what The Manchurian Candidate wants to teach us about Halliburton or American political parties. That's fine; I suppose it makes a decent case for the corruption of it all, at least within the confines of its universe. But all of its loose ends combine with its general ineptitude to destroy it. I have no beef with remakes; I have a problem with remakes that ignore the blessings of its source material to pursue a far inferior agenda.