Juggernaut (1974)

You won't be disappointed!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Absolutely the worst movie.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

"Juggernaut" was a well done thriller, but I have a special connection to the film, well, actually the ship used to film it. The fictional "Brittanic" was actually the German liner, Hamburg. The ship was nearly new when the first energy crisis hit and jacked fuel costs sky-high. The Germans were desperate to do anything for revenue, including renting their liner for a terror at sea film. Not much after, they sold the ship for cents on the dollar to the Russian Black Sea Line, which changed her name to Maxim Gorki. It was then I sailed on her on a cruise from New York to Bermuda. Fascinating experience, including KGB agents posing as "hosts". Their real job was to watch for crew defections. Years later, the Gorki was the site of a great power summit conference, but soon after that, she ran aground and was eventually scrapped. Just a bit of movie trivia. Now back to our reviews.

Yes, you've got a terrific cast here and the potential for a gripping thriller. Unfortunately, in spite of the presence of such legendary stars as Omar Sharif, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Harris, the film is an excruciating bore that seems to focus on explaining as to how this situation is being dealt with as opposed to showing much of the action in making that happen. A rather creepy voice makes several sinister sounding phone calls threatening a luxury liner with explosion in the middle of an ocean cruise. Sounding sort of like another doomed sea vessel on screen from just a few years ago, this misses characters you really want to see spared, and time with the passengers seems like a script afterthought. Attempts at humor fall flat and the mystery of who is threatening to blow up this ship and why isn't intriguing enough for the audience to care.There are moments when the film comes to a screeching halt, hitting empty air plot wise with a thud. Realizing an hour in to this lifeless bore that I wanted to see the whole thing speed up, I knew I'd be severely disappointed. There have been disaster films that were so bad that they become funny, but this doesn't even rank as a disastrous bomb. What it does end up being is one that wastes some fine actors pretending to be reciting intelligent dialog and dealing with a complex plot, but all it is turns out to be as exciting as trying to paddle a canoe through quicksand. Nowhere to go but down, and if the boat doesn't sink, you're basically stuck in muck not safe to try and escape from. For an hour and 20 minutes of needless exposition before anything else happens, by the time something does, it's pretty much too little, too late.

A vengeful terrorist calling himself Juggernaut (slyly played by Freddie Jones) plants seven explosive devices on the ocean liner HMS Britannic and demands a huge ransom in exchange for the information needed to dismantle said bombs. It's up to grouchy demolitions expert Fallon (Richard Harris in superior surly form) to save the day before time runs out.Director Richard Lester keeps the gripping story moving at a brisk pace, builds plenty of nerve-wracking suspense, makes excellent use of the creaky and sprawling ship, and tops everything off with a wickedly funny sense of fiercely mocking and subversive sardonic humor. The crafty script by Richard Alan Simmons refreshingly eschews cheap thrills and broad macho heroics in favor of a more starkly realistic approach in which even the protagonists are allowed to be flawed and fallible human beings who are decidedly less than noble and prone to error (for example, Fallon does his job more out of a feeling of scruffy obstinate pride than because it's the so-called "right thing to do").The bang-up acting by the ace cast keeps this film humming: Omar Sharif as the dissolute and ineffectual Captain Alan Brunel, David Hemmings as Fallon's easygoing partner Charlie Braddock, Anthony Hopkins as determined copper John McLeod, Ian Holm as worried executive Nicholas Porter, Shirley Knight as Brunel's pesky mistress Barbara Bannister, Clifton James as huffy politician Corrigan, and Jack Watson as hard-nosed Chief Engineer Mallicent. Roy Kinnear provides hilarious comic relief as jolly, but bumbling social director Curtain, who tries desperately to uphold morale among the passengers in the absolute worst of circumstances. A real solid and satisfying left of field entry in the 70's disaster cycle.

Richard Lester's "Juggernaut" appears to finally getting the respect it deserves as a superbly human suspense film. Plot: seven bombs are placed aboard ocean liner. High seas prevent lifeboat evacuation. Royal Navy bomb disposal team is airdropped to defuse devilishly clever bombs or everybody goes down with the ship. So ignore the copy line "The Greatest Sea Adventure Ever filmed" (it's not even a "sea adventure," it's a "bomb disposal adventure" and hello, it may be "the greatest bomb disposal movie ever filmed.") Superb performances by the best actors in GB, with Lester's gift for finding human moments amid all the tension--lost kids, scared clowns, heroic Indian stewards, humane policemen, witty upper class faded beauties plus the requisite alpha studs dealing with a terrible situation, all of it original. Note also how the red-blue theme is woven throughout the production (first image: red, blue streamers entangled as ship departs and the film comes down to a RN bomb disposal expert's choice between life and death when he must decide to cut a red or blue wire.) Lester constricts his own famous "style," the free-wheeling, goofily improvisational aspects of his Beatles films, and keeps the plot tight, the suspense high, the human vignettes touching, and the look and feel of the film entirely fresh. Thanks to Kino-Lorber for rescuing this superb film from the memory hole; it belongs with a few other diamond-perfect thrillers like "Charlie Varrick" and "The Third Man."