What do you get the multi-billion-dollar defense consortium that has everything? Why, a brainwashed United States president for its hip pocket, naturally. Just in time for Election Day.

Sorry, but does anybody else find that whole concept just a bit, you know, mundane? Director Jonathan Demme's modernized retooling of “The Manchurian Candidate” has all the trippy, stomach-churning paranoia you could ask for — and enough cross-hair suspense to keep us sweating up to the last shot — but in the final tally, the villains simply aren't up to snuff.

If you really want to give us the creeps, pony up some trust fund terrorists, not a Fortune 500. That’s not creepy, that's just ... depressing.

Updating the storyline and mixing in some new surprises, Demme (“Silence of the Lambs”) and screenwriters Daniel Pyle (“The Sum of All Fears”) and Dean Georgaris (“Paycheck”) have made a few canny alterations to John Frankenheimer’s 1962 espionage classic. Bennett Marco, the U.S. Army Major who uncovers a brainwashing plot with ramifications that stretch all the way to the White House, is now a veteran of the Gulf War, not the Korean. He’s also played by noted Italian-American actor Denzel Washington, who, like Frank Sinatra before him, gives a controlled burn of a performance that teeters excitingly between vulnerability and wild-eyed rage.

Plagued by the same, recurring nightmare about his service in the Gulf, Marco begins to suspect that the platoon under his command was secretly abducted during a reconstruction mission on Kuwait’s “Highway of Death.” Defying orders, he seeks out Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber from “Sphere”), the one-time staff sergeant and current U.S. Senator who won a Medal of Honor for allegedly saving the platoon.

Something about the official war story doesn’t add up. Maybe it’s the way all of his former mates describe Shaw — a stiff, loveless snob — with the same rehearsed line. Maybe it’s the microchip implant that Marco rips out of Shaw’s shoulder.

Meryl Streep brings her umpteen Oscars and infinitely pliant talents to the role of Shaw’s scheming shrew of a mother, Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, a master of cage-match politics who maneuvers her son onto the party’s presidential ticket as the V.P. nominee (the party is never specified).

Eleanor also has unsavory ties to a “private equity fund” called Manchurian Global, itself based on the Carlisle Group, the powerful business concern singled out by Michael Moore in “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Like Angela Lansbury in the original version, Streep steals the movie, mixing fiery rhetoric with Oedipal thunder to create one of the most intimidating screen villains we've ever seen.
Playing the sleuth, Marco connects Manchurian to the hypnotic muddle in his head, but the pieces fall together somewhat awkwardly, yielding a finale that lacks the clean, bitter, post-
McCarthyist irony of Frankenheimer’s original.

Though hotly intriguing and unmistakably well-made, “The Manchurian Candidate” has an insidious, haunting quality that one would be hard-pressed to term “pleasant.” Demme, a master of rattling the subconscious, fills the margins with ominous sound bites involving imminent terrorist attacks, foreign bombing campaigns, corporate corruption and general doom and gloom.

After an hour of it, you feel like taking a hot shower and flipping on some Air Supply — anything to peace out. As yet another inferior remake, that might be the film’s one enduring legacy: It succeeds in making us feel as oily and violated as the hero himself.