Unbelieveable hokum

This is a sad mishmash of a movie, and if you read any other critics saying what a marvellously taut thriller it is, it must be because they wear their underpants sagging round their ankles. Either that or they've fallen victim to Hollywood's version of Batesian mimicry, whereby a harmless creature evolves so as to resemble a fearsome predator: it looks like a taut thriller, it has music like a taut thriller, ergo it must

Denzel Washington plays Major Ben Marco, an army officer who, while out on a reconnaissance mission during the 1991 Gulf War, was ambushed, together with his platoon, by the sinister agents of a global corporate conspiracy.

Taken to a picturesque sand spit in the Arabian Gulf, Marco and his men were brainwashed by Dr Atticus Noyle (Simon McBurney), a renegade South African geneticist (doh!).

Marco was made to murder one of his own men, and so was Corporal Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber). Behaviour modifying implant doodahs were stuck in the survivors and they were programmed to believe that Shaw was a great hero who led them back to safety after single-handedly destroying the Iraqi enemy in a savage firefight.

Fast forward a decade or so. Shaw, who's the son of the powerful Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep), has himself got a seat in Congress. Running on the war hero ticket (he got a Congressional Medal of Honour for his fictitious exploits), Shaw is poised - with a little maternal manipulation - to become the vice-presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections.

Meanwhile Marco runs into an old comrade, Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright) who has been having disturbing dreams ever since Iraq.

Amazingly, this wakes Marco up to the fact that he, too, has been having disturbing dreams for years! Dreams that make him suspect he's been brainwashed by sinister agents of a global ... Oh well, you get the picture.

On it goes, looping in such valetudinarians as Jon Voight (playing principled Senator Thomas Jordan) and even Bruno Ganz (hamming it up as a goody renegade scientist).

Will Marco convince Shaw that he's a puppet before the controllers pull their strings and destroy democracy in the US of A? There's a sexy FBI agent ( cooerr) subplot - but isn't there always? And as the elastic sags - so to speak - we are bombarded with silliness.

Denzel Washington, who starts out a ramrod straight army officer, ends up - suitably enough - looking like a bemused Colin Powell on the verge of exiting the State Department, nubbyhaired and boss-eyed.

I suppose director Jonathan Demme and his screenwriters thought that, given the current imbroglio of Bush's war on terror, this remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 classic movie (itself an adaptation of a Richard Condon novel) would have fearful political resonance. But what they have produced - well-meaning Democrats that they are - is a flip-flopping John Kerry of a thriller.