Juggernaut

This movie has long been one of my most viewed videos for the following reasons. It has the considerable talents of the late Mr Roy Kinnear absolutely larking about on the high seas as the entertainment officer, which as anybody knows who has been in the business, is performed with perfect abplom. He cannot be faulted in a role just made for his considerable skills. Tony Hopkins as always underplays his role just to the point where you would want to kick him in the pants and get a move on. But this is just another great performance in a super movie where dramatic build up is mounted on each act of terrorism to a state where you dont know what action is about to explode from the drums within. Freddie Jones as the Hijacker and Omar as the captain also excel. The great Richard Harris has his ears and hands absolutely full with the horrific possibilities of being blowing sky high by the explosives placed on the ship, watch it and see what I mean. Overall a great "Disaster" movie of the genre. Only criticism would be the lack of music score which I think would have added in places a nearly always dramatic effect, but still warrants an eight point five out of ten.

Richard Lester directed this mad-bomber saga with such a cold, jaded eye, one might assume his approach totally unsympathetic or indifferent. Instead of being heartless, Lester is actually straightforward and compact, and the film is very involving. A transatlantic ocean-liner with 1200 people aboard no sooner leaves England's port then a genius-psychotic alerts the ship's representative that 7 booby-trapped bombs are set to go off in a matter of hours if he's not paid a fortune in ransom. Getting the bomb-experts aboard the ship via parachutes was a great touch--though once they're all in place, the movie has to bide a lot of time until the inevitable wire-cutting gets under way. Still, this is an exciting journey, filmed in bleak, damp colors, and Lester has done a terrific job at scaling down his actors. Omar Sharif (looking sensational in his Captain's uniform) had not been this real and human in years; Richard Harris, though he does his usual drinking and spouting off, successfully portrays the chief bomb-detonator as a swaggering man awash in a series of inconsistencies, acting with focus and tightly-wound energy. Good show! **1/2 from ****

This is one of those films that I was crazy about as a kid, and pleasantly surprised by years later. There are solid performances from an impressive cast including Richard Harris, Omar Sharif and Anthony Hopkins. The camera work is excellent as well, with some creative macro shots that help clarify the technical details and keep the tension high. Though it requires some patience and attention on the part of the viewer, this film is full of subtle details and is well worth the effort.

Back in the seventies disaster movies were the big thing - the Poseidon Inferno, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Airport, etc. Briton Richard Lester, director of the Beatles movies and a lot of comedies, went the same way with his thrilling 1974 bombs-on-a-big-ship thriller starring Richard Harris, David Hemmings, Anthony Hopkins and Omas Sharif. The plot is rather simple, but thrilling and entertaining from the beginning to the end. You will maybe even stop breathing during the ongoing action and suspense that are dominating the second half of the film when Harris and his team are trying to defuse seven bombs on the travel ship on its way over the Atlantic Ocean. Don't miss this suspense thriller when they show it on your TV station, it's worth being watched even after nearly thirty years.

**This comment may contain spoilers**

I've just had the pleasant experience of rewatching Juggernaut which I haven't seen since I was a kid back in 1975. What a terrific film! The story concerns a luxury cruiser - the HMS Brittanic - caught in a storm at sea when a terrorist, the 'Juggernaut' of the title, announces that he has planted seven bombs on board and demands a ransom in exchange for the passengers lives (the passengers can't take to the lifeboats because of the storm). So it's up to bomb disposal expert Fallon (Richard Harris) and his team to get on-board the ship by parachuting into the sea with their equipment from an RAF plane. But when negotiations between the terrorist and the police collapse Fallon and his men find themselves in a desperate race against time.

Sounds promising, huh? And the cast is amazing. In addition to Harris you've got David Hemmings as Fallon's sidekick, Anthony Hopkins as the policeman whose wife and kids are trapped on-board the stricken liner, Roy Kinnear (in a scene stealing performance) as the ships hapless entertainments officer and Omar Sharif as the ships captain. There's lots of great British character actors too including Freddie Jones (Firefox), Julian Glover (For Your Eyes Only), Ken Collee (The Empire Strikes Back, Ripping Yarns) and Ken Cope (who played the ghost in Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased).

The production values are equally impressive. The actors are actually on-board a real ocean liner in what looks like fairly rough weather. In some of the deck scenes you can actually see them sliding back and forth across the deck against rolling, grey, choppy seas. There isn't one faked up shot of actors in front of a back projection setup that I could spot and the realism adds a palpable 'you are there' sense of authenticity.

Juggernaut was directed by Richard Lester who demonstrates real talent for making the personal lives of those trapped on the ship as watchable as the suspense sequences. The crew and cast of the Brittanic aren't the laughable cardboard cut-outs of an Irwin Allen epic like The Poseidon Adventure but recognisable individuals with problems sharply observed by Lester with dry, British understatement. Chief amongst them is pretty American actress Shirley Knight who starts off as the Captain's mistress but wins our sympathy by discovering she has more in common with Kinnear's sensitive loser than Sharif's handsome but heartless Captain.

The unique setting of an ocean liner is also very well exploited, especially in one edge-of-your-seat sequence where a kid and a steward end up trapped between sealed bulkheads with a bomb about to explode. The dialogue (credited in part to Alan Plater) is consistently sharp and makes some pointed political digs. When the head of the company (Ian Holm) which owns Brittanic offers to pay Juggernaut's ransom a creepy Govenment rep advises him against it because of the subsidies HMG is paying to the company. When several people get killed even Holm's businessman can't stomach the callousness of risking several hundred lives for the sake of a Government investment, 'Tell him to go stuff his subsidies!' he yells at the adviser in one of many audience-pleasing moments.

Juggernaut is a work of rock solid professionalism and boasts a nail-biting climax. It's a reminder of what suspense thrillers used to be like before the Die Hard's and their successors twisted the format almost beyond recognition. I enjoyed Juggernaut a lot and I think you will too.