A thoroughly daft but beguiling adventure yarn that crosses the sturdy, old-fashioned gung-ho of Alistair MacLean with a proto-Die Hard concept. Anyway, how can one not love a film where the hero is named Rufus Excalibur Ffolkes? Okay… But it does star James Bond, Captain Nemo and Norman Bates as a terrorist, and embodies a brief bit of bluster in the late seventies when the British film industry decided it could try its hand at action movies. On a budget, mind.
It’s all a bit tinny by anyone’s, let alone Hollywood’s standards, and it’s hard to feel huge amounts of peril for a threatened oilrig, but there is enough tension, as well as wit, to carry it though as the wry nonsense it is. Giving its heroes and villains quirks (as opposed to depth) grants it a comic-book lightness and degree of self-awareness: Ffolkes just loves cats and wears stripy woolly hats but is still tough as a weathered hide. And the very tame action sequences are, at least, offset by some top notch posh accents.