This weekend brings us not one, but two movies about guys who’ve been groomed to kill without necessarily understanding why (or even being able to remember who they really are): American Ultra, starring Jesse Eisenberg as a perpetually stoned slacker whose sleepy demeanor belies his subliminally buried training, and Hitman: Agent 47, a do-over of 2007’s Hitman with Rupert Friend stepping in as the barcoded killer embroiled in a web of backstabbing bureaucrats. Naturally, our thoughts turned to previous films in which characters were mind-controlled into doing someone else’s lethal bidding, and we decided to dedicate this week’s list accordingly. It’s time for Total Recall!
A pitch-black manifestation of Cold War political paranoia, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate tapped into the lethal turmoil of the post-WWII global landscape to frame the story of a soldier (Laurence Harvey) who’s captured during the Korean War and, along with his men (including Frank Sinatra), subjected to brainwashing by Communist agents. Back home, Harvey’s a war hero, but his programming — and the machinations of his politically ambitious mother (Angela Lansbury) — threaten to unleash dire consequences. The 2004 remake earned positive reviews, but there’s no substitute for the almost unbearably suspenseful original; wrote Roger Ebert, “Not a moment of The Manchurian Candidate lacks edge and tension and a cynical spin.”
After the impressive commercial performance of 1972’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), Woody Allen opted for a follow-up with a somewhat larger scale: Sleeper, a futuristic comedy about a health food store owner (Allen) who’s cryogenically frozen after dying during a gall bladder operation, thawed out 200 years later, and manipulated into becoming an unlikely leader in a resistance movement — while falling in love with the woman who briefly thought he was a robot (Diane Keaton) — before being brainwashed into societal compliance and then un-brainwashed back into the resistance. Billed as a “nostalgic look at the future,” Sleeper offered a humorous counterpoint to the dry sci-fi epics of the day, predicting (sadly accurately, some would argue) that technological advancement wouldn’t be able to stem the rising tide of pure human foolishness. Mused Filmcritic’s Christopher Null, “Pound for pound and minute for minute, Sleeper may just have more laughs in it than any other Woody Allen movie.”
The Cold War was a sort of golden era for paranoid cinema, and it reached its arguable apex during the years surrounding the American military’s peak involvement with — and eventual withdrawal from — Vietnam. Perhaps no director channeled this period of unrest better than Alan J. Pakula, whose “paranoia trilogy” included 1971’s Klute, 1974’s The Parallax View, and 1976’s All the President’s Men, all of which fidgeted under the creeping certainty that the public was being increasingly manipulated by the unseen and nefarious hand of The Man. With Parallax, Pakula diverged into conspiracy thriller territory, enlisting Warren Beatty to star as a journalist who digs into the murky circumstances surrounding a senator’s assassination after his ex-girlfriend — a witness to the killing — turns up dead. Set apart by an outstanding cast that also included William Daniels and Hume Cronyn, as well as a brainwashing sequence that the audience experiences first-person, it offered a particularly nasty twist to the manufactured-assassin subgenre; the end result, as Tim Brayton argued for Antagony & Ecstasy, stands as “One of the great American films from arguably the finest decade in American filmmaking.”
Political assassination plots aren’t often played for laughs, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be funny — witness 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in which bumbling Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), seeking to avenge the brutal shooting of his partner (O.J. Simpson), finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a wealthy shipping magnate’s (Ricardo Montalban) absurd attempt to use a brainwashed Reggie Jackson to kill the Queen of England. If subsequent entries in the series found themselves strongly subject to the law of diminishing returns, perhaps that’s simply because the original hit so many of its targets with near-lethal hilarity. “The Naked Gun is destined to become a cult comedy classic,” predicted Roger Hurlburt of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “If the holiday run doesn`t make a bundle, the returns on the video cassette will.”
Julia Roberts is a successful attorney, and Mel Gibson is the cab driver who loves her. In 1997, that may have sounded like the basis for a surefire rom-com hit, but Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory offered audiences something different — namely, a paranoid thriller about a guy who seems like a ranting eccentric (Gibson), but who might actually be unwittingly sitting on an explosive secret that connects him to the woman he’s pined for from afar (Roberts). Toss in Patrick Stewart as an unscrupulous government bureaucrat, and you’ve got yourself a fairly sleek ‘90s espionage thriller — and a movie that, while it failed to resonate resoundingly with critics, racked up more than $135 million at the box office during its theatrical run. As Joe Baltake mused for the Sacramento Bee, “There’s nothing quite like a big, handsome, movie-star-driven Hollywood film when it’s done right.”
It’s debatable whether American audiences have ever really been in the mood for an absurd parody of the male modeling industry, but they really weren’t in the mood for one on September 28, 2001, when Ben Stiller’s Zoolander — featuring Stiller as a down-on-his-luck model brainwashed into trying to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia by a fashion mogul, criminal mastermind, and closet keytar player played by Will Ferrell — landed with a thud at the box office. Despite its underwhelming theatrical run and utterly ridiculous premise, Zoolander managed to earn some surprisingly positive reviews, both from critics who appreciated its timing (Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers called it “an oasis of bracing comedy that comes at just the right time”) and its goofy brand of satire (Dennis Lim of the Village Voice praised it as “a freakishly potent farce”). Cult classic status awaited on the home market, where lines like “listen to your friend Billy Zane, he’s a cool dude” reached their full comic potential, and 15 years after the original stiffed, Zoolander 2 is set to continue the saga in February of 2016.
What happens when you subject a guy to enough mental and physical conditioning to make him a perfect killing machine, but then he ends up surviving a botched mission with near-fatal injuries that leave him with no memory of his former life — yet he conveniently retains the lethal skillset that made him such an asset in the first place? Such is the deliciously entertaining premise that drives the Bourne franchise, which stars Matt Damon as the titular ex-CIA assassin and uses a series of bestselling Robert Ludlum books as grist for a hard-hitting, breakneck-paced saga that asks pointed questions about the cost of espionage while delivering a slew of delightfully staged set pieces that should leave action fans hooting with delight regardless of where they happen to fall on the political spectrum. “While the crunchy fights and unflagging pace ensure this delivers as genre spectacle,” mused Ben Walters for Time Out, “the muddy ethics also make for a pleasing contrast with standard-issue wham-bammery.”
Captain America: The First Avenger was a rip-roaring throwback to classic serials that lovingly tweaked WWII-era U.S. military propaganda while laying the groundwork for subsequent entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe canon — and it was a pretty good wartime buddy flick in the bargain. As Captain America readers were already aware, our hero Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) had a lifelong pal named Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), who (much like the good Captain) was presumed killed in the war, only to be revived years later and retrained to keep on fighting; the difference, in Bucky’s case, was that he ended up falling into the hands of the other side, who brainwashed him into becoming the ruthless assassin known as the Winter Soldier — and eventually going toe-to-toe with his former best friend. As one might guess given the title, that conflict takes center stage in the Captain America sequel, which pits opposing super-soldiers against each other while the entire post-9/11 intelligence community falls under the shadow of shifting loyalties and high-tech conspiracy theories. The end result, wrote Christopher Orr for the Atlantic, is “a movie that is, in the best sense of the word, a Marvel.”
