It's an enjoyable suspense flick about expertly assembled bombs secretly stashed away on a passenger liner carrying 1200 souls. The name of the extortionist is "Juggernaut." The ransom is half a million pounds, which the British government refuses to pay since it does not deal with terrorists.
The captain is Omar Sheriff. The team of the naval bomb disposal unit, sent out by airplane and parachute, is led by Richard Harris. Well, it's a tough situation, boys and girls. The sea is Force 8. The captain's illicit lover and entirely irrelevant girl friend, Shirley Knight, asks, "Is that strong?" Sheriff replies, "Yes." (The scale only goes up to 9.) The rough seas, though, make attempts to dismantle the seven bombs more dangerous and they also prevent the launching of lifeboats which, in the captain's estimation, would result in the loss of half the passengers.
There are some semi-comic interludes involving the passengers but the main plot is taken up with Harris's tinkering with one of the bombs, knowing that if he finds a way to disarm it, the others can be quickly rendered impotent.
Now, that sounds pretty dull. One can imagine with horror one of the stereotypical bomb dismantling scenes, which ordinarily take five minutes, stretched out to an hour and a half. Two thousand repetitions of questions like, "Should we (gulp) cut the red wire or the blue wire?" Instead, it's pretty engrossing stuff. While Harris fiddles with the wires, Scotland Yard is trying to track down Juggernaut in London, and the two threads run parallel, kind of like the copper wires in the cord to a floor lamp, only unshielded. Anthony Hopkins is quietly superb as the Scotland Yard guy and Harris is boisterous and compelling at the other end of the channel. Freddy Jones' appearance is brief but memorable.
Two more points. (1) You don't need to know much about bombs or serial circuits to follow the goings on and be swept up in the suspense, any more than you need to know how to play pool to follow "The Hustler." (2) The writers have done a fine job of individualizing the principal characters and they've given Harris some superior dialog. "If this doesn't work, I'm going to be shocked by my own mortality." And, "You've heard about the goldfish? One says to the other, 'There must be a God. Who changes the water?'" Overall, it's not a work of art in any sense, but an enjoyable thriller about bomb disposal at sea. Craftsmanship rather than poetry.
The captain is Omar Sheriff. The team of the naval bomb disposal unit, sent out by airplane and parachute, is led by Richard Harris. Well, it's a tough situation, boys and girls. The sea is Force 8. The captain's illicit lover and entirely irrelevant girl friend, Shirley Knight, asks, "Is that strong?" Sheriff replies, "Yes." (The scale only goes up to 9.) The rough seas, though, make attempts to dismantle the seven bombs more dangerous and they also prevent the launching of lifeboats which, in the captain's estimation, would result in the loss of half the passengers.
There are some semi-comic interludes involving the passengers but the main plot is taken up with Harris's tinkering with one of the bombs, knowing that if he finds a way to disarm it, the others can be quickly rendered impotent.
Now, that sounds pretty dull. One can imagine with horror one of the stereotypical bomb dismantling scenes, which ordinarily take five minutes, stretched out to an hour and a half. Two thousand repetitions of questions like, "Should we (gulp) cut the red wire or the blue wire?" Instead, it's pretty engrossing stuff. While Harris fiddles with the wires, Scotland Yard is trying to track down Juggernaut in London, and the two threads run parallel, kind of like the copper wires in the cord to a floor lamp, only unshielded. Anthony Hopkins is quietly superb as the Scotland Yard guy and Harris is boisterous and compelling at the other end of the channel. Freddy Jones' appearance is brief but memorable.
Two more points. (1) You don't need to know much about bombs or serial circuits to follow the goings on and be swept up in the suspense, any more than you need to know how to play pool to follow "The Hustler." (2) The writers have done a fine job of individualizing the principal characters and they've given Harris some superior dialog. "If this doesn't work, I'm going to be shocked by my own mortality." And, "You've heard about the goldfish? One says to the other, 'There must be a God. Who changes the water?'" Overall, it's not a work of art in any sense, but an enjoyable thriller about bomb disposal at sea. Craftsmanship rather than poetry.