:
Richard Harris,
Richard Harris,
Omar Sharif,
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:
Richard Lester,
Richard Lester
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: 
: MGM
: Action, Foreign, Disaster Action, UK
: 110 min.
: English
: English, Spanish, French
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Recently Rented By DLeonard
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Following his successful foray into swashbuckler comedy with The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, director Richard Lester made what has proved to be one of the few quality films from the disaster craze that dominated filmmaking in the mid-'70s. Juggernaut is the pseudonym of a madman (Freddie Jones) who plants several steel drums aboard a luxury liner and calls the company's officials once the boat has put out to sea, demanding a large sum of money in exchange for instructions on how to defuse bombs inside the drums. Anthony Hopkins plays one of the company officials whose wife and children are aboard the ship, Omar Sharif is the ship's captain, Shirley Knight is a passenger who is also his mistress, and Richard Harris and David Hemmings are two members of the bomb disposal team, which is helicoptered onto the ship to defuse the explosives. As in many of Lester's best works, humor pops up in unexpected places; particularly memorable are Harris as the weary but wisecracking top dog among the explosives experts and Lester regular Roy Kinnear as a bumbling entertainment director desperately trying to distract the apprehensive passengers. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
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| Ripe for rediscovery
by tboot
July 22, 2003 - 11:23 AM PDT
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7 out of 7 members found this review helpful
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| Now, here's a lost classic from the '70s. I've been wanting to see it for years, it being a Richard Lester film, and it's just come out on DVD. It truly deserves a rediscovery. It's not only a nail-biting thriller, but it's an anti-thiller, too. Lester loved to subvert the usual cinema heroics (see his 3 Musketeer films and their hilarious, sloppy swordfights), and in Juggernaut, though a luxury liner is on the verge of being blown up by a terrorist, the passengers, rather than succumbing to hysterics and screaming, sit passively waiting for their doom. After all, there's really no choice -- they're in the middle of the Atlantic. The film festures a cream-of-the-crop British cast, including very young versions of Anthony Hopkins and Ian Holm and, best of all, Richard Harris as the sardonic bomb expert and Roy Kinnear as the ship's entertainment officer. The film is rich and layered and skirts a good many of the ticking-time-bomb movie cliches with Lester's patented offhand film-as-tapestry approach, not to mention his sly humor. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.38)
16 Votes
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