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How sad is this?

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

A slow-burning thriller with strong performances from stellar cast Richard Harris, Tony Hopkins, Ian Holm, David Hemmings, Omar Sharif & Freddie Jones together with some lovely comedy moments from the wonderful Roy Kinnear. Accepted...not much action but that would have detracted from the confined scenario and character-driven tension. Very underrated and under- appreciated.

JUGGERNAUT is an electrifying British suspense thriller from 1974 that fully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the best of the disaster and thriller genres of that decade. For the former, imagine THE TOWERING INFERNO and EARTHQUAKE; for the latter think of terrorist thrillers such as BLACK Sunday and TWO MINUTE WARNING.The film's set-up is simple enough, concerning a Transatlantic cruise liner which is targeted by a mad bomber who has hidden seven oil barrels packed with explosives inside the ship. The action shifts between the innocent passengers on board, the bomb disposal team trying to get rid of the bombs, and the authorities back in London trying to track down the person responsible. It's no mean feat to keep all three plots concurrent and as interesting as each other, but director Richard Lester manages it.Everything about this film is great. An all-star cast do very well in their roles, particularly Richard Harris, David Hemmings, and Kenneth Cope as the chief bomb disposal experts. The back-in-London scenes are handled nicely by the youthful likes of Anthony Hopkins and Ian Holm. The passenger stuff is the less interesting of the three plot strands, but we do get Omar Sharif as the ship's captain and Roy Kinnear hilarious as the comedy relief.The film gradually changes tack as the running time progresses, becoming less predictable and more and more gripping as it goes on. The bomb disposal scenes are every bit as nail-biting as those in the better-known HURT LOCKER and indeed things build to a climax absolutely riven with tension; the whole thing is a masterclass in suspense. By all accounts this film bombed (pun intended) on release due to the lack of action, but for my money these thrills are far more realistic and exciting than the usual gung-ho shoot-out stuff.

It's an enjoyable suspense flick about expertly assembled bombs secretly stashed away on a passenger liner carrying 1200 souls. The name of the extortionist is "Juggernaut." The ransom is half a million pounds, which the British government refuses to pay since it does not deal with terrorists.The captain is Omar Sheriff. The team of the naval bomb disposal unit, sent out by airplane and parachute, is led by Richard Harris. Well, it's a tough situation, boys and girls. The sea is Force 8. The captain's illicit lover and entirely irrelevant girl friend, Shirley Knight, asks, "Is that strong?" Sheriff replies, "Yes." (The scale only goes up to 9.) The rough seas, though, make attempts to dismantle the seven bombs more dangerous and they also prevent the launching of lifeboats which, in the captain's estimation, would result in the loss of half the passengers.There are some semi-comic interludes involving the passengers but the main plot is taken up with Harris's tinkering with one of the bombs, knowing that if he finds a way to disarm it, the others can be quickly rendered impotent.Now, that sounds pretty dull. One can imagine with horror one of the stereotypical bomb dismantling scenes, which ordinarily take five minutes, stretched out to an hour and a half. Two thousand repetitions of questions like, "Should we (gulp) cut the red wire or the blue wire?" Instead, it's pretty engrossing stuff. While Harris fiddles with the wires, Scotland Yard is trying to track down Juggernaut in London, and the two threads run parallel, kind of like the copper wires in the cord to a floor lamp, only unshielded. Anthony Hopkins is quietly superb as the Scotland Yard guy and Harris is boisterous and compelling at the other end of the channel. Freddy Jones' appearance is brief but memorable.Two more points. (1) You don't need to know much about bombs or serial circuits to follow the goings on and be swept up in the suspense, any more than you need to know how to play pool to follow "The Hustler." (2) The writers have done a fine job of individualizing the principal characters and they've given Harris some superior dialog. "If this doesn't work, I'm going to be shocked by my own mortality." And, "You've heard about the goldfish? One says to the other, 'There must be a God. Who changes the water?'" Overall, it's not a work of art in any sense, but an enjoyable thriller about bomb disposal at sea. Craftsmanship rather than poetry.

Released at the height of the disaster movie craze of the 1970's, this is more a suspense film than an all-star catastrophe epic. Sharif plays the stoic captain of an outdated cruise liner who is informed of seven bombs placed throughout the lower levels of the ship, which will explode in 24 hours unless a ransom is paid. While the police, the British government, the British navy and the management of the line scramble in London to find a solution and locate the extortionist, Harris (a demolitions expert) and his team are parachuted in to try to disarm the explosive devices. Meanwhile, seasick passengers battle fear and ennui as activities director Kinnear struggles to keep the mood cheerful. A truly staggering cast, made up of mostly British character actors, delivers interesting performances under the surprisingly taut and trim direction of Lester (who also infuses the film with his customary brand of subversive humor and perverse sense of the absurd.) Sharif has very little of note to do in his role other than act as a masthead and allow others to bounce off of him, but he looks nice in his Captain's gear. Harris has a very nice part and plays it well. Hemmings, as Harris' sidekick develops a likable persona. Hopkins effectively plays a police detective who has the added pressure of knowing his wife Mortimer and their two children are on board the threatened vessel! Holm is excellent as the harried manager of the cruise line. Knight has a dour, thankless role as a bored, restless, married passenger, but manages to inject some wryness into her line delivery. James scores a few points as a cut-the-bull passenger and Jones is a memorable blackmailing suspect. Cusack and Hordern appear without billing in small, but effective, roles. Visible briefly on deck is MacCorkindale as a helmsman. Lester placed the cast and extras upon a real life, down-on-its-luck cruise ship and sought out the worst possible weather, giving the film a sense of dreary verisimilitude that works in its favor. This is no slick Hollywood (or Irwin Allen-esquire) product but a cold, sometimes tense film with only some scattered humor to break the stress. Several sequences provide proper action and suspense, though the committed cast keeps everything pretty well grounded. Lester, who made quite a few comedic films is actually quite at home here, though the original author was unhappy enough with some of the changes Lester made to the script to have his name changed to an alias. He doesn't go for the sentimental (for example, there are no scenes of Hopkins and Mortimer crying on the phone together) nor does he dwell on the disaster elements. An explosion rocking a ballroom and setting off a sprinkler system is barely shown at all! He focuses instead on the mystery elements of the bomber and on the quest to disarm the bombs before the ship is destroyed. It's an unusual but mostly captivating piece of movie-making.