The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

In the second version of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate, set in the early 2000s - the George W. Bush era - the global danger is no longer coming from communists but from the dictatorship of big business, the multinationals that profit from war. The title no longer refers to Manchuria but to the sinister Manchurian Global, a fictional investment fund (echoes of Halliburton and the Carlyle Group) that tries to take control of the White House by implanting a chip in the brain of Congressman Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), who is thus to become the first remotely controlled vice president of the US in the first corporate coup. This is all done with the knowledge of his emasculating mother Eleanor Shaw, a reactionary senator and uber-bitch, a role Meryl Streep eagerly sinks her teeth into.