Juggernaut (15) |Home Ents Review

If you grew up in 1970s Britain, you will love this very Brit take on the disaster movie genre. But this is way more than a nostalgia fest: it’s a grimy, gritty suspense thriller with a wonderful cast.  

Britannic, a rather shabby passenger liner, leaves Southampton. Just as the ship hits bad weather in the Atlantic, the ship’s owner (Holm) receives a telephone call from a man who calls himself Juggernaut. Juggernaut has placed seven bombs on the Britannic and they will go off in 24 hours unless £500K is left in two suitcases at Heathrow Airport. 

The UK government parachutes a bomb disposal team led by Fallon (Harris) onto the ship and they set about defusing the bombs. Meanwhile, Captain Brunel (Sharif) and his staff – gold star or extra braid must go to Roy Kinnear playing Social Director Curtain – set about reassuring the slightly unnerved passengers. 

Also meanwhile, the police, led by Superintendent McLeod (Hopkins), round up the usual suspects in the UK to see if anyone knows anything about the identity of Juggernaut himself. 

The film focuses on the bombs in situ and the interiors of the ship rather than luxuriating in spectacles of destruction. As well as a lack of spectacle, there is also an almost complete lack of glamour on display, as the passengers are a motley crew from the squeezed middle classes of the era. They don’t really panic either – there is a lot of the Brit “oh well, mustn’t grumble” attitude on show. All of this is very refreshing. 

The acting is pretty understated – Richard Harris only gets shouty and throws a whiskey bottle at a wall once (onscreen, at least). Sharif and Hemmings are nicely subdued, leaving the audience to ooh and aah at a range of cameos, from Clifton James (J.W. Pepper from Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun) to Freddie Jones, Cyril Cusack and Michael Hordern. 

Anglophile US director Richard Lester asked English playwright Alan Plater to rewrite the script when Mediterranean locations fell through and the production was stuck with the grim North Atlantic. This choice was inspired as the film now looks like a nice big dollop of British grey-skies thinking: depressed, ironic and anxiety inducing.  

Roy Kinnear epitomises proceedings: swivel eyed and sweaty, professional and mildly amusing.