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Three Days of the Condor Movie Review

Three Days of the Condor is a 1975 political thriller film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. It’s a standard genre piece that could and should have been more thrilling.

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“I don’t interest myself in “why”.

I think more often in terms of “when”,

sometimes “where”; always “how much“

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A CIA researcher is shocked to see that all of his co-workers are dead. He is bookish and has little knowledge of how to outwit those responsible. He has to figure out who he can really trust. This is a post-Watergate thriller that was obviously quite timely, but isn’t as timeless and as relevant now as it must have been back in the seventies. Still, the movie proved to be quite influential, particularly on the MCU’s ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ interestingly enough.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Robert Redford as an actor. I find him to have been a much stronger director as he did direct some terrific movies, but in the acting department, he is only serviceable. Faye Dunaway is much more memorable here in a smaller, but solid role. I also liked Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow, but again only Redford gets the meaty role. He is solid, but the protagonist overall is bland and not all that exciting to follow around.

Three Days of the Condor is a somewhat muted 70s thriller. The problem here is that it needed more excitement, more action and more suspense. What we got is solid as some scenes have those elements, but there are too many slow stretches that do not help make the movie as timeless as it could have been.

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Still, the dialogue is very strong and the themes of surveillance and conspiracies were interesting. The movie is a solid example of those political thrillers form this decade that are all but extinct now, and they should be brought back with a quicker pace and more timely themes. That would be great. For all its flaws, this movie is still much more engaging and memorable than ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ in my opinion.

Three Days of the Condor benefits from solid turns from Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway and a plot that was relevant for its time and thematically rich. The movie needed more suspense, more excitement and a quicker pace, but the dialogue is very good and the second half is quite memorable. It is also interesting to see how this film influenced Captain America: The Winter Soldier in its political thriller elements.

My Rating – 3.5