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Clooney and Kidman flee an exploding cliché |
Director: Mimi Leder
Cast: George Clooney (Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe), Nicole Kidman (Dr.
Julia Kelly), Marcel Iureş (Dušan Gavrić), Aleksandr Baluev (Gen. Aleksandr
Kodoroff), Rene Medvešek (Vlado Mirić), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Col. Dimitri
Vertikoff)
In the late 1990s, Steven Spielberg, music tycoon David Geffen and the former chairman of Disney Jeffrey Katzenberg banded together to pool their knowledge and resources to found their very own film studio, DreamWorks. Excitement abounded – what would be the first film released from DreamWorks? How would all that genius and experience express itself? The answer was The Peacemaker.
In the late 1990s, Steven Spielberg, music tycoon David Geffen and the former chairman of Disney Jeffrey Katzenberg banded together to pool their knowledge and resources to found their very own film studio, DreamWorks. Excitement abounded – what would be the first film released from DreamWorks? How would all that genius and experience express itself? The answer was The Peacemaker.
Cliché.
It’s a film cobbled together, Frankenstein-like, from bits
and pieces of other movies. Russian separatist soldiers steal nine nuclear
warheads. The USA immediately leads efforts to locate these bombs, their
efforts spearheaded by a maverick Army colonel (George Clooney) uneasily paired
up with a by-the-book White House Nuclear Weapons expert scientist (Nicole
Kidman). The trail leads them to dodgy Eastern-European officials playing both sides shoot
outs in picturesque locations such as Vienna and non-descript ex-Soviet
republics, and a cat and mouse chase in
New York for a man on a very personal mission of revenge.
It’s quite something, an achievement almost, to sit down and
watch a film and see nothing original in it at all. That’s the case with The Peacemaker: there is literally
nothing in this film that you won’t have seen in any action film made between
1980 and 2000. It’s such a perfect capturing of clichés and tropes it could
almost work as a time capsule piece. A reasonably film literate person could
probably take a decent stab at writing down the plot of the film in advance with
nothing more than a cast list and brief one-line synopsis.
It’s also fun now to see Clooney and Kidman play such dumb,
by-the-numbers roles like this, having seen how far both of them have come
since the 1990s. Back then, Kidman was best known for being Mrs Tom Cruise and
Clooney as the star of ER struggling
to break Hollywood. Both of them go through the motions with assurance, though Clooney
is basically Doug Ross in an army uniform while Kidman plays a sort of
Hepburnish scientist, overtly unimpressed (but secretly very impressed) by her
macho comrade. There is a retrospective interest seeing them in something you can’t
imagine either of them touching with a bargepole today.
The film is routinely directed by Leder, then a staple on ER’s director payroll, with a habit of
expressing the same clichés over and over again. Most of the action sequences
lack any real flair, though a truck chase is reasonably well done and the final
half hour chase around New York works well enough.
The plot is straight forward, although like many of these
things it doesn’t really make any sense at all when you sit down and think
about it (twice I think I’ve watched this in my life, and I still don’t
understand how the baddies fund their operation). But everything has a back-of-a-fag-packet
briefness to it, not least the yawningly familiar tale of our heroes slowly
growing to respect each other. In fact the most original beat of the film is
probably that they don’t end the film
locking lips.
I guess you could say The
Peacemaker is exactly the sort of safely dull, totally forgettable, paint
by numbers bland piece you could expect a fledgling studio to dip its toes into
the water with. It goes with the sort of formulaic familiarity that’s worked
for countless films in the past. It’s inoffensive enough and (good judgement by
them) they snagged two actors whose fame has increased exponentially since the
making of the film, meaning it will always have a lifespan on TV repeats. DreamWorks
went on to much better things than this TV-Movie of the week, but at least this
one-for-the-money job is okay, you won’t mind wandering in and out of the room
while it’s on, and you might even enjoy some of its spirited retreads of worn clichés.
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