Juggernaut
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Movie Reviews of Juggernaut
Movie Review: At last I have found you!
Summary: 5 Stars
I originally saw this in the theater when it first came out, and several times on TV. Unfortunately it seems to have disappeared from network programming, and my local video store both.This was one of the most intense "cat and mouse" type thillers of it's day. The battle of wits between Fallon (R. Harris) and the bomber will keep your eyes locked on the screen to keep from missing anything. The plot and storyline are as intricate as the bombs themselves.
If you enjoyed the more recent movie "Blown Away" then you will enjoy this one. Blown Away used many of the same techniques developed in Juggernaut, and is the logical film decendant of this classic.
Movie Review: Sorry....Technical mistake overlooked!! - BOOM!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great film. I've watched it many times and enjoy it each time. Great acting. Great plot. However, there is a major technical "glitch". Realizing that they know the bombmaker knows what they know, and they know he knows...well, they are thinking like the bombmaker thinks. The mistake is the photocell. If light hits it....BOOM! So they work in the dark, find the photocell...and CUT THE WIRES! They did not check to see what kind of circuit it was, either normally "open" or "closed". The bombmaker could have easily made the device to be a dummy so when you cut the wire it would explode.
Well, it's still a great film. Enjoy the ride!
Movie Review: amazing
Summary: 5 Stars
I'M THE BIGGEST FAN OF THIS MOVIE IN THE WHOLE WORLD ,THERE'S NOTHING LIKE THIS FILM,GREAT ACTORS,I LOVE THE MANIAC PERFORMED BY FREDDIE JONES AND THE EXPLOSIVES SQUAD TOO WITH A WONDERFUL,INCREDIBLE,AWESOME,UNFORGETTABLE RICHARD HARRIS AS THE HEAD OF THE TEAM,WITHOUT DISREGARDING THE LIKES OF ANTHONY HOPKINS OMAR SHERIFF,IAN HOLM...JUGGERNAUT I'LL NEVER FORGET YOU!!!I'LL LIVE FOREVER IN THE BRITANNIC AND I COULD SWEAR I'M LISTENING THE EXPLOSIONS...IS IT THE BLUE WIRE OR THE RED ONE ? I WANT THAT DVD NOW !!!Movie 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.
Movie Review: The subversion of genre conventions and narrative
Summary: 4 Stars
SPOILERS BE ABOARD HERE. WATCH THE FILM FIRST.
Arriving rather later in the disaster cycle of the early-70's -- and sandwiched between his two Musketeer excursions, I think -- Richard Lester's JUGGERNAUT met with almost complete disinterest from the critical establishment -- with the notable exception of positive reviews from Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris -- and little success at the box office.
Lester's immediate problem in making the film was how to keep the presentation of the material original and compelling without departing too far (superficially, at least) from the associated conventions. He solves this to some degree at the narrative and dramatic levels by focusing on the minutiae and mechanisms of the central predicament and the needs of those characters involved in the life-death situation to derive some meaning from it. (There are many unusual "little bits" of character in this film.)
Visually and structurally, Lester develops a complex correspondence between colors and objects and incidents, and, from first shot to last, enters a critical discourse with the logic/illogic of his narrative. What his strategy accomplishes here is nothing less than to overturn any simple understanding of what exactly "happens" at the end of the film, although the ending is seemingly right in front of the audience: the hero triumphs, the bombs are defused and lives saved, the formula is secure and in the ascendant.
The narrative line seems clear from beginning to end (with an occasional digression). As the film proceeds, however, the attentive viewer notices more than just a few examples of "some rather horrendous plot and dialogue lapses" (as a reviewer elsewhere has mentioned), including a crucial wrenching "gaff" in the denouement which appears to substantially diminish the possibility for any positive resolution of the crisis aboard Britannic -- and reduces the audience's suspension of disbelief in such a conclusion -- a resolution which seems to occur moments later in the film, regardless.
The true horror of the central predicament in/of JUGGERNAUT is that survival for the hundreds aboard the liner apparently depends upon an either-or decision by a single character, Fallon (Richard Harris) -- a decision he is compelled to make on his best experience and intuition and at the risk of his life -- and the subsequent exact repetition of his choice by several other characters at a blind distance from him and from each other who are to follow his lead. The hopeful assumption shared by all -- with the exception of Fallon, who knows that what is to follow is actually a cascade of indeterminacies, and who is therefore without hope -- is that his local resolution (success-failure) will figure consistently throughout the array of bombs, i.e., that they are all wired similarly -- how could the narrative proceed if they are not? -- and that the next man in line will know what to do regardless of what happens to Fallon.
At the last moment, Fallon changes his mind without telling anyone, makes the other (unspoken) choice, and acts against the careful visual correspondences to conflagration and survival Lester has constructed throughout the film.
Reviewers note how seemingly ridiculous Fallon's behavior is without taking into context the profound isolation (and nihilism?) of the character. And narratively his silence doesn't seem to make sense at all unless it is understood as a tacit admission by Fallon (and the filmmaker) that the dilemma as portrayed is fundamentally inexorable, unsolvable, the "juggernaut" of the title: If the bombs are wired differently, then it doesn't matter what Fallon says or does, as each man in succession will face his own either-or decision, and the probability is that a bit more or less of half of them will get it wrong. That Fallon makes the "right" choice now (that everyone in succession follows him, that the intervention is successful and everyone saved, etc.) seems beside the point.
The narrative feels "exploded" and the viewer senses catastrophe has occurred in the fabric of JUGGERNAUT. The few moments left to the film feel like a (quite beautiful) glide into a receding fantasy. While allowing his audience the narrative contrivance of a positive conclusion for his hero and those aboard Britannic, Lester has managed -- through a succession of visual/aural tropes and seeming logical inconsistencies leading up to and through Fallon's silence and decision -- to suggest very strongly why such a conclusion must be felt as unconvincing, that the worst has inevitably occurred, and that all aboard are lost.
Given what the audience has been led to understand earlier in the film, the wordless last shot really says it all.
I believe JUGGERNAUT is one of Lester's three great films, and one of the best films of the 1970's. THIS TITLE NEEDS TO BE RESTORED AND GIVEN A QUALITY TRANSFER TO DVD!