Set mainly in New York City and Washington, D.C., the film is about a bookish CIA researcher who comes back from lunch, finds all his co-workers dead, and must outwit those responsible until he figures out who he can really trust.
Basically, the film is a throwback to the 60s anti-Bond spy thriller (a la The Ipcress File), except here the genre's annihilating irony has been replaced by Pollack's liberal piousness.
Basically a B, it has been elevated in form -- but not in substance -- via four bigger names, location shooting and more production values. Sometimes the trick works, but not here.
At its best moments, Three Days of the Condor creates without effort or editorializing that sense of isolation -- that far remove from reality -- within which super-government agencies can operate with such heedless immunity.
CineVue
April 11, 2016
Bringing restraint and composure without skimping on the requisite tension and intrigue, Pollock builds a credible, character-led adventure.
Three Days of the Condor is a well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it's all too believable.
While its thriller elements deliver, the film is undermined by a subplot that was surely over-egged even when it was made and which has only been further diminished by the passage of time.
A piece of dotty, slightly paranoid intrigue. Three Days of the Condor promises little and keeps its word. It is hard to get indignant about it, or enthusiastic either.
