Juggernaut
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DVD details
Actor: Anthony Hopkins, David Hemmings, Omar Sharif, Richard Harris, Shirley KnightBrand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dubbed, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 109 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-07-15
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
DVD Reviews of Juggernaut
DVD Review: BOOM!
Summary: 4 Stars
Here we go again with yet another disaster style epic from the 1970s. You know how the routine goes, don't you? Hire a bunch of big Hollywood names, some up and comers and some over the hill, and plop them down in the middle of a life-threatening situation. Irwin Allen made a career out of these types of films, weighing in with movies like "Earthquake," "The Swarm," "When Time Ran Out," "The Towering Inferno," and a bunch of other titles. Some chap named Ronald Neame brought us a movie about an ocean liner turned upside down by a tidal wave in the 1972 classic "The Poseidon Adventure," which Irwin Allen promptly followed up a few years later with "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure." Obviously, the law of diminishing returns kicked in with this much product floating around, and the disaster movie quietly slipped into coma until Hollywood resurrected the formula at the end of the 1990s with movies like "Armageddon," "Dante's Peak," and several others. One film that seems to have slipped through the cracks, however, is Richard Lester's 1974 thriller "Juggernaut." Here it is, given to us on DVD by none other than MGM. It's an interesting entry in the disaster genre.
It's important to note that Lester readily subscribed to the idea that a disaster film needs an all-star cast. To meet this goal he hired Omar Sharif, Richard Harris, David Hemmings, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Freddie Jones, Shirley Knight, Clifton James, Julian Glover, and Roy Kinnear to play major and minor parts. If you don't recognize some of these names, you'll likely recognize their faces. Taken together these actors have made probably a few thousand films. Anyway, the plot is incredibly simple. An ocean liner called the Britannic sets sail from England with some 1,200 passengers aboard. Unfortunately for these folks there are also seven bombs in seven steel drums scattered throughout the ship. The first sign of trouble arrives when Nicholas Porter (Holm), the chief executive of the travel company that owns the Britannic, receives a terrifying phone call from an individual calling himself Juggernaut. This man tells Porter about the bombs on the boat, and demands that the company pay him half a million pounds within twenty-four hours. If someone decides to drag their feet, the bombs will detonate and sink the ship. Yummy. Predictably the cops and the government enter the picture, namely in the form of Scotland Yard investigator John McCleod (Hopkins) and bomb disposal expert Anthony Fallon (Harris).
The passengers, despite the best efforts of Social Director Curtain (Kinnear) to cheer them up, soon discover exactly what's going on. They can't leave the ship, however, since a storm in the North Atlantic makes using the lifeboats a risky proposition. All they can do is sit helplessly by as Fallon and his crack commandos parachute into the sea and climb aboard the ship to defuse the explosives. Standing by to assist in the tricky operation is the ship's captain Alex Brunel (Sharif), his main squeeze Barbara Bannister (Knight), and McCleod's wife and two children who just happen to be passengers on the boat. Fallon soon discovers that Juggernaut is a crafty devil, an expert bomb maker with abilities that may well surpass his own. The movie from this point forward falls into the predictable pattern of showing us the passengers moving about the boat at the behest of Social Director Curtain, scenes of McCleod trying to track down Juggernaut back in London, and Nicholas Porter arguing with the government over the effectiveness of caving into the demands of the terrorist. Seeing as how "Juggernaut" is a bomb thriller, you can bet your bottom dollar that we'll see a scene where Fallon agonizes over which wire to cut. Red or blue? Times a wastin'!
I went back and forth with "Juggernaut." No one can argue with the level of talent here, as every one involved turns in a solid performance. Unintentional snickers, though, must go to Roy Kinnear for his spirited rendition of "Roll Out the Barrels." It's also nice to see Roshan Seth in a small role as Azad, a lowly servant on the ship who makes the ultimate sacrifice (love that Al Pacino haircut too, man!). What I do take exception with is the uneven character development. I suspect a lot of footage ended up on the cutting room floor in order to make the film move along faster because some of the interactions between characters don't carry much weight. You'd think McCleod would be on edge with his wife and kids on the boat, but he looks like he's ready for a nap. Too, the relationship between Bannister and Brunel seems superficial and doesn't add anything to the plot. Perhaps the greatest sin committed by Lester's movie involves what I call Annoying Kid Syndrome. I kept waiting for someone to strap McCleod's offspring to one of the bombs, or at least throw them overboard. These two are like fingernails on a chalkboard! But the tension works at times, Harris hams it up every chance he gets, and the ending is riveting despite being a cliché.
MGM saw fit to give us "Juggernaut" with a trailer as the only extra, sad to say, but the picture quality looks very sharp. It's letterboxed, too. If you're a nut for these types of movies--the disaster movies of the 1970s, that is--I say give this one a shot. I'm struggling about how many stars I should give the movie. "Juggernaut" hovers somewhere between three and four due to the problems cited above, but the fact that it redeems itself at the end should count for something. Most importantly, it lacks the utter ridiculousness of many of Irwin Allen's destruction epics. Let's round up and say four for the overall effort. It's a good way to spend a couple of hours.
Description of Juggernaut
The high seas have never been more terrifying than in this riveting, tension-packed adventure. Richard Harris (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) and Omar Sharif (Doctor Zhivago) head an all-star cast that includes OscarĀ(r) winner* Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal) in a"tingling" (The Village Voice), edge-of-your-seat shipboard thriller! HMS Britannicis caught in a storm at sea. But the real terror is on boardseven bombs planted by a terrorist calling himself Juggernaut, who demands a high ransom in exchange for the passengers' lives. Bomb expert Fallon (Harris) is flown to the ship and, as negotiations break down, he struggles with the mostchallenging job of his life in a race against time! *1991: Actor, The Silence of the LambsBestsellers in DVD
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