This thriller from 1975 has maintained its freshness; sure the technology is old fashioned but the story is still gripping without relying on non-stop action, explosions and shaky camera work one would expect today. Robert Redford plays a CIA employee who returns from lunch to find his entire section has been killed; why is a mystery, they aren't investigating anything serious; they just analyse books. Realising he is in danger he leaves the scene and phones his superior from a phone box; he is given instructions about how to come in safely but when he follows them he is ambushed. He manages to escape but now he realises that he can't trust anybody inside the CIA. He makes his escape by kidnapping a woman and eventually persuading her that he is actually one of the good guys and that he needs her help. In order to survive he must find out just what it was that his section discovered that was so serious that people would kill to keep secret.
It was refreshing to watch a thriller that didn't rely on constant action; in fact the tensest scenes often involved just two people talking where there was a feeling that something could happen at any moment. Robert Redford did a good job as man on the run Joseph Turner and Max von Sydow was particularly menacing as the soft spoken assassin. Director Sydney Pollack kept things tense throughout without things getting melodramatic. I liked how the viewer is kept unsure about who if anybody within the CIA can be trusted without making everybody out to be monsters and when we do learn the motive it feels just as topical as it was back in the seventies.
It was refreshing to watch a thriller that didn't rely on constant action; in fact the tensest scenes often involved just two people talking where there was a feeling that something could happen at any moment. Robert Redford did a good job as man on the run Joseph Turner and Max von Sydow was particularly menacing as the soft spoken assassin. Director Sydney Pollack kept things tense throughout without things getting melodramatic. I liked how the viewer is kept unsure about who if anybody within the CIA can be trusted without making everybody out to be monsters and when we do learn the motive it feels just as topical as it was back in the seventies.