The original is a paranoid thriller about some American soldiers captured in Korea and brainwashed by their Chinese and Russian captors as part of a grand conspiracy to put a covert Communist in the White House. It always heads in the direction of its own improbability, disorienting you for your amusement with material you can't assimilate or believe. For instance, it shows you the brainwashing scenes from the captured soldiers' perspective without telling you what's really going on. These scenes, in which the soldiers appear to be at a meeting of a ladies' garden club, feature the most dementedly funny footage ever put in a violent thriller.

On top of that, the conspiracy (getting a clandestine red elected as Vice President and then assassinating the President) has a fine bit of effrontery at its heart. The VP candidate is a parody of Joe McCarthy, portrayed as a brainless boor, but when unmasked he is--a Communist, and thus a justification of McCarthy's own warnings. The original thus treats the Communist threat as real but in a jokingly exaggerated way. It had something to offend everyone.

The Communist threat was real, of course, but is no longer, and so the new moviemakers have replaced the Red Chinese and the Soviets with businessmen, which doesn't fit the premise. As Ronald Reagan made plain, and exploited to their detriment, totalitarian dictatorships rack up unsustainable costs in order to keep their warlord grip on power. Businessmen seek profits on income, and government is a massive, unproductive outlay they don't need. Worse, these new moviemakers aren't kidding. They really think that big business is out to conquer the world (though they probably discount the threat of Communism). By any and all indications they give in the movie, however, they have absolutely no clue what they're talking about.

I keep formulating my disbelief over the new movie in a way that answers itself: If they're so very ignorant about business why are they paranoid about it? The villain in this new Manchurian Candidate is a business entity, repeatedly called a "private equity fund." In the real world (and speaking generally), private equity funds are partnerships that seek capital from large investors (e.g., tax-exempt institutions, such as state pension funds and universities, and wealthy individuals) to invest in buyouts of undervalued businesses, or startups, in single or multiple sectors, depending on opportunity, the fund managers' experience, and other factors. They're operated as partnerships rather than corporations in order to avoid corporate-level taxation on their income. (Click here for a more positive take than the movie's on the kind of international business activities private equity funds conduct.)

A fair amount of the information about the movie's private equity fund, Manchurian Global, is provided in voice-over news reports, and among the sins ascribed to it only the accusation of price-gouging is at all plausible. (This could happen if the fund bought a large enough stake in a company to influence management decisions. All the same, overreaching in business is hardly a recent phenomenon.) My favorite nitwit bit in the movie is the reference to the private equity fund's operating through a "subsidiary partner," which is a phrase comparable to Faye Dunaway's "sister-daughter" in Chinatown except there's no possible situation in which it could be used. And how on earth would a private equity fund make money from capitalizing a private army? What's the nature of the income stream--interest? dividends?