Cinema: All at Sea

JUGGERNAUT

Directed by RICHARD LESTER Screenplay by RICHARD DEKOKER

Something old, something new—or newer, anyway. A dotty old bomb expert concocts a superbomb that he uses to blackmail an entire city. About 20 years ago it was called Seven Days to Noon. The city was London, and the scientist attempting to stop construction of atomic weapons threatened everyone with thermonuclear destruction if his demands were not met. In the movie’s own stiff and militaristic terms, this was enough to establish the scientist’s madness. Preparedness was quite the thing back then, and anyone who wanted to stop the arms race was probably round the bend. Considered today, Noon’s scientist seems eminently sympathetic—a little extreme, maybe, but with his heart in the right place.

Juggernaut updates the Noon plot device by combining it with that most lamentable of contemporary genres, the catastrophe epic. This time, it is a floating city that is in danger: the liner Britannic, with 1,200 passengers aboard. The mad bomber is … well, let’s just say disgruntled. No use ruining the surprise.

The movie was directed by Richard Lester, a film maker of satiric skill and carbolic wit unsurpassed in the contemporary English-speaking cinema (Petulia, The Bed Sitting Room and the recent Three Musketeers). Lester is also a superb stylist, and he has made Juggernaut into a cunningly engineered entertainment, full of suspense. The Poseidon Adventure, by inevitable comparison, looks like something staged by a kid in his bathtub just before bedtime. Lester has done the calamity number about as well as it can be done. Why it has to be done at all is another matter.

The scenario is a concoction of leftovers. The writing is generally barbaric. The characters are exactly the ones who usually appear on rosters for such trips: a cool demolition expert (Richard Harris), his good-humored sidekick (David Hemmings), a terse, harried Scotland Yard operative (the excellent Anthony Hopkins), and an unflappable ship’s captain who keeps his turmoil to himself (Omar Sharif). It is usually clear in these hairbreadth holocaust excursions exactly how they are going to turn out. The object is to obscure the inevitable, an exercise that Lester performs with great skill.

Juggernaut is one of those creations that manage to be pleasant even though they are filled with silly, shallow adventure-film conventions. These are just the conventions that Lester mocked with such glee and fierce precision in one of his best movies, How I Won the War, It is disconcerting to find him, at least temporarily, behind enemy lines.

J.C.