Grade: D+

Verdict: Don't waste your vote; stick with the original.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

Angela Lansbury was right. A remake of John Frankenheimer's brilliant 1962 thriller, "The Manchurian Candidate," is a lousy idea.

And she should know. Her Oscar-nominated performance as a Monstrous Mom willing to sacrifice anything, even her only son, for power, remains one of the most vivid character portraits in movie history.

The Frankenheimer film, which also starred Frank Sinatra as a seasoned military man and Laurence Harvey as Lansbury's smothered son and a member of Sinatra's squadron in Korea, has long been shadowed by rumors and conspiracy theories concerning its odd release. Sinatra, who also produced, withheld it from circulation for years after its 1962 release, and his decision has often been linked to the assassination of his close friend JFK.

Shadowed, perhaps, but not overshadowed. When the movie finally received a long overdue re-release in 1988, it was rightly hailed as a masterpiece of politics and paranoia.

The new version comes with honorable credentials. The estimable Jonathan Demme ("The Silence of the Lambs," "Philadelphia") directs Denzel Washington in the Sinatra role, Liev Schreiber in the Harvey role and Meryl Streep in Lansbury's role. Demme has also re-imagined the picture, meaning there are some very good changes and, alas, some very bad ones.

The Manchuria in the '62 film referred to the province in Communist China and the Red Chinese who put Sinatra and his men though some extremely serious and thorough brainwashing during the Korean War. The time-bomb plot posited that, thanks to Harvey's curdled momma's boy, the Communists could manipulate the political process and place their own puppet candidate in the White House.

The remake retains the brainwashing, though it now takes place during the Gulf War. However, it comes up with a very different and splendidly timely "Manchuria" -- Manchurian Global, a power-hungry multinational corporation with its own designs on the White House. Lansbury's Mrs. Shaw is now Senator Shaw (Streep). Her war-hero son -- who supposedly saved his entire platoon -- has been hot-wired for success and is her party's vice presidential candidate.

By contrast, his superior officer, Capt. Marco (Washington), has fallen on hard times. His military service consists of addressing Boy Scout troops, he lives in a dingy, cramped apartment piled high with magazines and newspapers, and he's plagued by a recurring nightmare about what happened in the war. What if everyone in the platoon had been brainwashed into believing that Shaw was a hero -- "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being" as Marco and the other soldiers so mechanically repeat. What if everyone, especially Shaw, had been programmed in hopes of producing the perfect designer candidate?

Demme and his writers, Daniel Pyne ("The Sum of All Fears") and Dean Georgaris ("Paycheck"), have made significant changes. Both the Manchurian-planted assassin and the VP candidate, for example, are completely different characters here. And the critical father-son relationship between Marco and Shaw -- which provided the emotional crux of the earlier picture -- has been replaced with a more predictable semi-adversarial relationship.

Streep is dazzling as always, but she can't match Lansbury -- mainly because the new version of the character is so thuddingly inferior. Schreiber comes nowhere near to emulating Harvey's brittle, cold and ultimately tragic little-boy-lost, but again, he doesn't have the opportunity. Even Washington can't escape the essential shallowness of his reconfigured role -- though, like Streep, he always engages us.

Most damaging is Demme's decision to leave out the flourishes that made Frankenheimer's film so uniquely masterful. Gone is the filigreed stuff surrounding the plot -- the middle-aged garden-party gossips the men see instead of their Chinese captors or the celebrated game of solitaire with its deadly queen of diamonds that triggers Shaw's programming.