Three Days of the Condor

Redford is clearly the best spy, at least based on collar height.

Halfway into Three Days of the Condor, I felt like I was watching a pretty good movie.  I couldn’t believe that a watchable movie had been made in the 70’s.  Then came a love scene that couldn’t be any more improbable if it involved a bear and a shark doing it on the back of a unicorn.  A scant eight hours after finding his girlfriend dead, Robert Redford’s laying pipe to Faye Dunaway.  After kidnapping her at gunpoint.  Right before she was about to go see her boyfriend.  I can’t imagine this ever happening in real life, but then again, I don’t look like Robert Redford.

It’s probably unrelated, but after that moment, a pretty competent spy movie goes off the rails and crashes into the Sensical Plot Development Assisted Living Community, leaving no survivors.  As Robert Redford tries to track down who killed everyone he works with and find out why, we’re introduced to a variety of names, places, motives, and 70’s hairstyles that make no sense.  It’s all hastily cobbled together at the end to leave an unsatisfying conclusion.  It’s not actually complex, just poorly explained.  When someone gets shot suddenly, you can barely muster the enthusiasm to give a half-hearted, “No!  Not….that guy!  Whoever he was.”

I haven’t liked any Robert Redford movie I’ve seen, and I’m prepared to blame him for that.  I was once compared to a young Robert Redford by a senile, partially blind woman, and I now take it for the insult she clearly meant it to be.  Damn you old senile lady!

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: No.