![]() Some get families, some of whose members get threads of their own. Much is elaborated upon new characters, including the habitually understated William Hurt as Joe’s uncle-mentor, have been created and formerly minor figures blown up to major ones: the assassin played by Max von Sydow in “Three Days of the Condor” gets a gender swap into the person of Leem Lubany. If the new stars lack the widescreen glamour of their predecessors, they fill as much of the screen as they need to, and play well together. (“Condor” was Turner’s code name in the original unless I missed it, the word has no context here.) The woman is Kathy Hale (Katherine Cunningham, succeeding Faye Dunaway), a bystander who becomes his unwilling host and hostage after things go south. The regular person is Joe Turner (Max Irons, in a part previously occupied by Robert Redford), a CIA analyst who reports an intriguing pattern to his superiors, kicking off a chain of calamitous events. At the same time, knowledge of earlier “Condor” properties is not a reliable guide to exactly where this one, which adds volumes of new material, is headed. (Alfred Hitchcock built a few films on this armature.) Certain other key incidents, and some stray lines of dialogue, make the cut into this largely enjoyable new iteration on Audience Network via DirecTV and AT&T U-verse, but I will leave them vague in case this territory is all new to you. As a production by a media platform that’s just now seriously entering the scripted drama business, Condor is an honorable effort, thoughtfully made even when it’s struggling to differentiate itself from similar projects that came before.Sydney Pollack’s 1975 film “Three Days of the Condor,” adapted from author James Grady’s 1974 conspiracy thriller “Six Days of the Condor,” has now become a miniseries, simply titled “Condor.” Like a game of telephone each has something to do with the previous version, while turning into something quite different.Īt their shared core is the story of a more or less regular guy who has discovered something - or a fraction of something - that has him running for his life, while antagonistically tied to a woman he must convince of his innocence. The end product lacks a certain verve - at certain points, you might start to miss the flamboyant ridiculousness of other spy stories - but there’s something to be said for a production that consistently, purposefully errs on the side of doing as little as it can to get its point across. The result is something along the lines of Homeland with a touch of Tom Clancy: a workplace drama, essentially, in which bureaucrats, military personnel, analysts, and spies get tangled up in an international conspiracy. Fraser has many years of experience using his broad shoulders, looming height, goofy smile, and sad Pekingese eyes to create characters who are simultaneously menacing and sympathetic, and this performance is another keeper in that vein. Brendan Fraser, who seems to be undergoing a career renaissance this year, has a scene-stealing part as a professional killer. ![]() Lubany is a standout as Gabrielle Joubert, playing the series’ most complex and hard-to-read character in a manner that illuminates her facets without handing you too much information right out of the gate. Bob Balaban, Mira Sorvino, and Leem Lubany have supporting roles as intelligence operatives of varying influence and resourcefulness. ![]() (Having seen the first three episodes, I hesitate to describe too much of the plot, though I will say that viewers of the 1975 film won’t be surprised that the first episode ends where it does.) William Hurt plays Joe’s boss, Bob Partridge, a figure who reads as sinister only because we’ve seen Hurt play both tenderhearted nice guys and profoundly immoral people. Suffice to say that Joe finds out some things he shouldn’t and is forced to go on the run while he gets to the bottom of it all. Max Irons plays Joe Turner, a talented young CIA analyst who stumbles onto a plot that has something to do with a deadly biological agent. Although there are some borderline James Bond-ian scenarios designed to make you appreciate that the entire world could be in danger, the action and conversation are photographed to make them seem as if they could actually happen. The idea of expanding the novel’s story so that it becomes fodder for an ongoing series would seem like a step in the wrong direction, but showrunners Jason Smilovic and Todd Katzberg make it work by getting the tone right. ![]() The new AT&T Audience drama Condor is loosely based on James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor , which begat the beloved 1975 Robert Redford spy thriller Three Days of the Condor, a movie so determined not to bore its audience that it sliced the time frame of its source material in half. ![]()
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