Streep lacks the shameless, caricatural quality Angela Lansbury brings to the role in the original. Lansbury doesn't play a character in a realistic sense but outlines the grotesque creature, and her very distance from the part she's outlining with such bravura becomes the center of the aesthetic experience. In short, a witty but indelicate irony is central to Lansbury's performance. Streep, by contrast, isn't trying to be grotesque and is too conscious a craftswoman for irony. She's such a scrupulous realist that she's quite convincing as a tough politico. But she's so plausible in the scene in which she has to win the vice-presidential nomination for her son that you can't imagine what greater edge she's hoping for by implanting a computer chip in his brain. (She shows too much relish for winning the old-fashioned way.)

Remember, too, that when Lansbury bustles and squawks as the woman behind the numbskull vice-presidential candidate, the character is consciously playing a role. Streep, by contrast, is straightforwardly strong in and out of the conspiracy, and the script has the lady senator being openly supported by the bad guys, whom she confers with in public. In this way Streep moves closer to Lansbury's untwisted performance in Frank Capra's straight-up political melodrama State of the Union (1948), and her faults are only accentuated by the movie's earnestness, although the director Jonathan Demme does cut her scenes to enhance her timing. (Streep at least rouses you from your torpor, which is more than you can say for Denzel Washington, giving one of his numb-lipped, downcast-idealist performances.)

The updated joke was probably supposed to be something like "Republicans are the new Communists," but it doesn't detonate like a joke. The original movie was an act of comic provocation; this new one turns into a grim and muddled attempt to provoke thought and perhaps outrage. (The only thing I found myself thinking about afterwards was whether this new movie is supposed to take place in a world in which the first movie exists.) To fans of Demme's work from Citizens Band (1977) through Married to the Mob (1988) he's a god among moviemakers, but here he turns out to have a head of clay.

Collateral

Collateral, directed by Michael Mann from a script by Stuart Beattie, offers about as thoroughly worked-out an allegory as you'll find in movies. Tom Cruise plays Vincent, a hitman, who hires Jamie Foxx's Max, an L.A. cab driver, to chauffeur him around town while he bumps off witnesses set to testify against a druglord. Max is the hero, and Vincent, his antagonist, is a sociopath who feels no qualms about killing for hire. At the same time, however, Vincent represents the kind of assertive masculinity that Max sorely lacks and could use in order to effectuate his business plans, cope with his mother, win the girl.