After having been recently refitted, Captain Alex Brunel (Omar Sharif) sets off with ocean-liner Britannic and 1200 souls. The owner receives a call from Juggernaut who is demanding a limited ransom after placing seven bombs on the ship. Bomb expert Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Fallon (Richard Harris) leads his team onto the ship. Under pressure from the government, the company decides not to pay. Lead Scotland Yard investigator Supt. John McCleod (Anthony Hopkins) happens to have his family onboard.

This is a fine disaster movie. Bomb disposal is not always the most kinetic of action thrillers. This one is able to maneuver around that by having seven bombs and having them on a moving ship. I do keep thinking about Speed2. The plot needs to explain why the ship couldn't stop. It could be moving towards a rescue ship. More epic production would put the ship in a storm. There is more stuff that could be done. There is one fun scene with excess weight. The ending is a bit underwhelming. All in all, this is fine.

I remember seeing Juggernaut when it first came out in theaters back in 1974 and I was sucked in rather nicely as the tension builds in this film. I'm not sure Alfred Hitchcock could have done better building the suspense.

Yet it could have been a lot better. The mastermind behind the plot to extort half a million pounds really doesn't have all that good a motive for what he does. And his actions towards the end of the film when he's caught and the jig is up so to speak, make absolutely no sense.

Juggernaut proceeds on many different levels, as his HMS Britannic sails for a cruise from I presume Southampton a bomb threat is phoned into the ship owners from a man identifying himself as Juggernaut. He wants the amount mentioned above or five strategically placed bombs will explode and sink the Britannic along with 1200 passengers and crew.

Scotland Yard under Anthony Hopkins looks to find the man, shipowners decide to pay, Captain Omar Sharif finds out and tells the crew and they try to keep the passengers minds off the strange doings on the ship. Special mention goes to Roy Kinnear as the cruise director for that particular job and his performance is great.

But primarily the film focuses on Richard Harris and his team of demolition experts. As he's mentioning often enough, he's the best at his job, the champion. He has to be because the stakes are at the highest possible level if he comes in second. And the man he's up against is a brilliant demolitions man himself.

According to a recent biography of Harris he was filming Juggernaut in the United Kingdom and flying back to the USA in intervals to film 99 and 44/100 Percent Dead. How his agent got him into that kind of deal God only knows, but I think he did better on the UK side of the pond.

Juggernaut is a good suspenseful thriller that probably would have been a lot better with more understandable motivation from the villain's point of view.

Yes, you've got a terrific cast here and the potential for a gripping thriller. Unfortunately, in spite of the presence of such legendary stars as Omar Sharif, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Harris, the film is an excruciating bore that seems to focus on explaining as to how this situation is being dealt with as opposed to showing much of the action in making that happen.

A rather creepy voice makes several sinister sounding phone calls threatening a luxury liner with explosion in the middle of an ocean cruise. Sounding sort of like another doomed sea vessel on screen from just a few years ago, this misses characters you really want to see spared, and time with the passengers seems like a script afterthought. Attempts at humor fall flat and the mystery of who is threatening to blow up this ship and why isn't intriguing enough for the audience to care.

There are moments when the film comes to a screeching halt, hitting empty air plot wise with a thud. Realizing an hour in to this lifeless bore that I wanted to see the whole thing speed up, I knew I'd be severely disappointed. There have been disaster films that were so bad that they become funny, but this doesn't even rank as a disastrous bomb. What it does end up being is one that wastes some fine actors pretending to be reciting intelligent dialog and dealing with a complex plot, but all it is turns out to be as exciting as trying to paddle a canoe through quicksand. Nowhere to go but down, and if the boat doesn't sink, you're basically stuck in muck not safe to try and escape from. For an hour and 20 minutes of needless exposition before anything else happens, by the time something does, it's pretty much too little, too late.