Academy award winning director Jonathan Demme is reunited with Denzel Washington - they worked on Philadelphia - in a remake and updating of the John Frankenheimer Sixties classic The Manchurian Candidate, which also co-stars Meryl Streep and Emmy nominee Liev Schreiber.

Washington plays a US Gulf War army major, called Marco, who is haunted by bad dreams that give him fragments of some sort of trouble that befell him and his unit out in the Kuwaiti desert. The truth appears to be that they were saved solely by the heroics of Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Schreiber), who won the Medal of Honor for his bravery during an ambush. At night, Marco's dreamlike memories of the incident suggest something infinitely more terrifying. Did two soldiers from his unit meet darker fates than those officially recorded and is Shaw, running for the US presidency and seemingly cold to Marco's questions, the glorious hero that everyone thinks he is?

As the race for The White House hots up, Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw's (Streep) influence on her son belies a steely determination to get what she wants, whatever the consequences.

The Manchurian Candidate was a classic when it came out in 1962, with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh. Transferred to the first Gulf War, it doesn't convince so readily, despite "the little guy vs the might of the state" paranoia that serves its thriller credentials well, ably exploited by Washington, who is tailor-made for this sort of role. It falls down because it seems too unbelievable that someone in this day and age would go to the lengths suggested in the film to achieve personal ambitions, when so much could go wrong.

One other departure from the original that works less well is the fact that the audience don't see exactly what happened in the desert - you are given glimpses of the horror, that's all - and to achieve true shock value, everything should have been shown.

Washington makes the proceedings run with suitable amounts of suspense and Streep, as a no holds barred matriarch from hell, is quite brilliant. Look out, too, for Jon Voight in a cameo role, as an adversary to Streep's insanely ambitious senator, and Simon McBurney (Vicar of Dibley writer and Theatre de Complicite impresario) playing the wonderfully named madcap baddie scientist Atticus Noyle.

And so not without interest, but by no means flawless, either.