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THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE - REVIEW

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Denzel Washington stars in this remake of The Manchurian Candidate which sees a group of soldiers come home after the war only to find that they all start having the same nightmare which makes them suspect that some kind of brainwashing happened along the way. After a bizarre encounter with Jeffrey Wright's soldier, who has pretty much lost it completely, Washington decides to try and make contact with Liev Schreiber's co-veteran, who has since moved on to working in politics. Under the supervision of his controlling mother, played by Meryl Streep, Shreiber is leading a campaign to become the new Vice President. But he slowly starts to remember the nightmares Washington mentions which paint him not as a war hero but as something else entirely. What follows is a thriller not so much focused on action as it is focused on the core mystery. The film is directed by Jonathan Demme ( Silence Of The Lambs ) and he handles the growing paranoia well despite the post-Gulf War settin

THE EQUALIZER - REVIEW

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Loosely (very loosely) based on the 80's TV series, The Equalizer really is yet another excuse to have Denzel Washington pretending to be a real everyday guy with a boring life while simultaneously being a one-man-army prone to killing bad guys in badass ways. In a weird way, this works more like a prequel to the series as Washington comes to realise, through what happens in this movie, that he can use his talents and his CIA contacts to solve seemingly unsolvable problems random people are faced with. In this instance, he takes it upon himself to protect a young prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) from some Russian mobsters. The man's life, which consists of working at Home Depot, reading classic novels, taking tea very seriously, motivating people to lose weight in order to become security guards, all the good stuff, goes from a dullfest to... basically him becoming Batman and taking people out in various creative ways. For one thing, he times the fights he gets into, as if