Don't Give The Bird To A Solid Political Thriller Like Three Days of the Condor

You ever feel like you just missed something important at your job? Like, maybe you turned your back for two seconds to help a customer and you suddenly missed some important instructions or orders from your boss? Boy does Joseph Turner (Robert Redford) know that feeling. He works for a C.I.A. branch that's dedicated to looking over reading materials (like novels) to see if they overlap with actual secret C.I.A. plans. It's not glamorous, but it's a living. Anywho, one day he goes out to a diner around the corner to pick up lunch for his co-workers and comes back to discover that everybody in his office has been viciously murdered by unknown enemy forces.

The Front Runner Is Lackluster Fare Desperately In Need Of Some Personality

The Front Runner is a movie after Dragnet's heart in that it's very much a "Just The Facts, Ma'am" kind of production based on the three-week-long scandal that sank the Presidential chances of Democratic Party candidate Gary Hart. It presents the events that happened, a bunch of the real-life people involved with them but never creates a perspective or a personality of its own in the process. Going the "Just The Facts, Ma'am" route may have helped Dragnet solve some crimes in his own TV show, but doing the same approach here ends up meaning The Front Runner just feels empty as a movie. It's a wannabe political thriller without any of the brains, thrills or thoughtfulness that define the best entries in this subgenre.

Robert Redford And Dustin Hoffman Take On A Subdued And Compelling Crusade For The Truth In All The President's Men

A recurring sentiment in the middle of the daily deluge of Earth-shattering political news transpiring in the modern era is that all these events are so unbelievable that they'd be thought of as too far-fetched if they were to occur in a piece of fictional media. Alas, reality tends to be stranger than fiction and it isn't just the current political affairs of the United States of America that are prime examples of this trend. There are numerous real-life events from the past to choose from if you want to look at just how outlandish reality can become and, especially the 1972 Watergate scandal and the ensuing conspiracies surrounding this event, conspiracies that were uncovered by studios investigative journalists.