DVD Review: An accomplished disaster flick
The seventies might be called the Golden Age of Disaster Movies: the floodgates (as it were) opened with the original “Airport” (1970), and out gushed a deluge of multistar, big-budget entries like “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972) and “Black Sunday” (1977). Finally, as a new decade dawned, “Airplane!” ridiculed the already waning genre out of existence. Nestled somewhere between “The Towering Inferno” (1973) and “Earthquake” (1974) was Richard Lester’s “Juggernaut” (1974), which was effectively lost in the shuffle.
It’s a shame, since it’s one of the few that really does the job — incredibly suspenseful, even while eschewing the bloated self-importance of its competition. Lester reportedly took over the project just a few weeks prior to the shoot after two other directors quit during preproduction. Together with screenwriter Alan Plater, he reworked the script substantially enough to induce one of the original writers to take his name off the project.
The skeleton of the plot is overly familiar in retrospect and wasn’t entirely fresh even at the time: A bomb expert calling himself Juggernaut has planted seven large explosive devices aboard the ocean liner called The Brittanic. (How he knew that weather conditions would prevent any attempts to evacuate the passengers is anybody’s guess.) If paid a huge ransom, he will provide instructions in how to stop the bombs from detonating.
The weather is still good enough for a very young Anthony Hopkins to arrange for a defusing team (led by Richard Harris and David Hemmings) to be airlifted to the ship, in hopes of seeing through Juggernaut’s various tricks. Harris steals the show from a rather stiff Omar Sharif, but the supporting players — particularly Roshan Seth and Lester regular Roy Kinnear — are almost as memorable.
The climax, of course, is “Do we cut the red wire or the blue wire?” Before you groaningly dismiss the film for using this hoary old concept, be aware that “Juggernaut” seems to have invented it. It only seems hoary now because so many others have imitated it.
An earlier DVD release has been long out of print; Kino Lorber has put out a new edition on both Blu-ray and DVD. The quality is perfectly acceptable; there are no extras (outside of a trailer), which is par for the course for discs of relatively low-demand titles.
Juggernaut (Kino Lorber, Blu-ray, $29.95; DVD, $19.95)
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).