Following his successful foray into swashbuckler comedy with
The Three Musketeers and
The Four Musketeers, director
Richard Lester made what has proved to be one of the few quality films from the disaster craze that dominated filmmaking in the mid-'70s. Juggernaut is the pseudonym of a madman (
Freddie Jones) who plants several steel drums aboard a luxury liner and calls the company's officials once the boat has put out to sea, demanding a large sum of money in exchange for instructions on how to defuse bombs inside the drums.
Anthony Hopkins plays one of the company officials whose wife and children are aboard the ship,
Omar Sharif is the ship's captain,
Shirley Knight is a passenger who is also his mistress, and
Richard Harris and
David Hemmings are two members of the bomb disposal team, which is helicoptered onto the ship to defuse the explosives. As in many of
Lester's best works, humor pops up in unexpected places; particularly memorable are
Harris as the weary but wisecracking top dog among the explosives experts and
Lester regular
Roy Kinnear as a bumbling entertainment director desperately trying to distract the apprehensive passengers. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide