Avis Metacritic

3 Days of the Condor is a classic spy thriller. It remains just as relevant and thrilling today as it did in 1975. It's a film built around political metaphors and pessimism, trends that continue to spiral and evolve throughout our culture even today, with events unfolding that oddly mimic this film's once outlandish plot.

A well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it's all too believable.

Add to the mix gregarious powerhouse producer Dino De Laurentiis, plus regular Redford directorial collaborator Sydney Pollock and, unsurprisingly, the resulting film is a cracking thriller.

A thrilling pseudo-expose on the corrupt inner workings of covert organizations.

Thanks to an intelligent script, partly by Lorenzo Semple Jr (Pretty Poison, The Parallax View), the action rarely falters, and at its best the film offers an intriguing slice of neo-Hitchcock.

The film is a perfect contemporary example of an old studio formula approach to filmmaking. 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.

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.

As a straight thriller Condor comes down to thrills that work and thrills that don't. [29 Sep 1975, p.84]

Sydney Pollack doesn't have a knack for action pulp; he gets some tension going in this expensive spy thriller, but there's no real fun in it.

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a throwback to the 60s anti-Bond spy thriller (a la The Ipcress File), except here the genre's annihilating irony has been replaced by Pollack's liberal piousness.