The Parallax View

The Parallax View is a claustrophobic conspiracy thriller about a journalist, Joseph Frady, who gets on the trail of a sinister conspiracy. A few years after the assassination of a popular senator, the witnesses to the unsolved crime are murdered one by one. The deaths appear natural at first sight, so Frady brushes off his female colleague, who witnessed the killing with him, when she tells him she fears for her life. Shortly afterwards she is dead.

Frady gets on the trail of the Parallax Corporation, whose activities are hard to see through. At the risk of his life Frady manages to discover that the organisation recruits outcasts and maladjusted elements as hired killers. In order to expose the shady enterprise, Frady uses an alias and lets himself be recruited, but can one little man fool a large and powerful organisation?

The Parallax View gets off to a promising start with a series of surprising plot twists and a dense atmosphere, but after the first hour the story begins to fall apart and the implausibilities pile up. The final sequence is impressive, but it is also a suspense killer that is dragged out interminably.