JUGGERNAUT Movie Review

It sounds like something you'd want to avoid at all costs; a psycho has planted a number of bombs on a luxury ocean liner, and the legendary demolition expert sent to the scene sweats heavily while deciding whether to cut the blue wire or the red wire. As it happens, director Richard Lester's 1974 Juggernaut is probably one of the most enjoyable and breezy thrillers of this type ever made; when it took a dive at the boxoffice, it was probably because its distributor sold it as a disaster movie in the Poseidon Adventure mold. (Those who couldn't stomach another disaster movie stayed away, and those who wanted to see a disaster movie were disappointed. Now that's marketing.) Richard Harris plays the poor guy who has to figure out how to keep the 1,200 passengers from being blown to bits, while the portly, wonderfully spry Roy Kinnear is in charge of keeping the paying customers cheered up. Juggernaut followed a four-year hiatus for Lester, which he took after a series of ambitious movies that disappointed either commercially (Petulia), artistically (How I Won the War), or both (The Bed-Sitting Room). Juggernaut may have simply been conceived as an exercise to see what kind of condition his moviemaking muscles were in, but his energy and imagination and crackling juxtaposition of comedy and suspense make it one of Lester's most exhilarating rides. With Anthony Hopkins, Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Shirley Knight, and David Hemmings.

NEXT STOP … Help!, Petulia, Cuba

1974 (PG-13) 109m/C GB Richard Harris, Omar Sharif, David Hemmings, Anthony Hopkins, Shirley Knight, Ian Holm, Roy Kinnear, Freddie Jones; D: Richard Lester; W: Richard DeKoker; C: Gerry Fisher; M: Ken Thorne. VHS MGM, FOX