SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

capone666 JuggernautTerrorists rarely take cruise ships hostage because governments don't pay ransom on people who take cruises.Back in the 1970s, however, commandeering cruise ships, like the one in this thriller, was commonplace.Passengers on the SS Britannic are thrown into peril when a terrorist named Juggernaut informs the ship's owner (Ian Holm) that there are explosives on-board set to detonate if he doesn't receive a healthy ransom.Meanwhile, a bomb specialist (Richard Harris) is airlifted in to defuse the situation, while a Scotland Yard detective (Anthony Hopkins) works on tracking down the mad bomber.Light on Hollywood theatrics due to its British production, this fictional account of a real life event that turned out to be a ruse is grounded and gritty in its storytelling. The classically trained cast also brings a high-level of professionalism to the crisis.Thankfully, the on-board entertainment tends to get a lot better under terrorism. Green Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

mark.waltz 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.

Hunt2546 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."

Robert J. Maxwell 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.