Avis des critiques

When the great Omar Sharif died recently, the BBC's coverage of the sad event included clips from Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, of course, and then cut to Richard Lester's Juggernaut just as the voice-over commented on the declining quality of Sharif's later films, causing me to splutter into my cocoa and pen angry letters to Auntie Beeb in my mind, for Juggernaut is a fantastic example of seventies British cinema. It's what I remember seventies Britain being _like_.

Juggernaut keeps the trappings of The Poseidon Adventure (catastrophe in lavish locale, cast of thousands) and turns everything English. The luxury liner is depressing and grey, disappointment and inevitability replace flamboyant heroics, and in this way one actually worries about the dozen chess pieces moved around by an unseen terrorist. It's the film people seem to remember the least from the 1970s vogue for destruction, but it's the only one worth seeing.

Apart from [the] polished fillips and his usual abbreviated (if uneven) array of filler gags, Lester mainly shows his expertise by keeping his warhorse of a plot moving, gliding efficiently from one point to the next and accumulating a respectable amount of suspense along the way.