Juggernaut

**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.