On her last day in a recording studio, Janis Joplin did an acapella number asking the Lord to buy her a Mercedes Benz. She didn’t specify whether the car should be bulletproof, as to better protect George Clooney and Nicole Kidman in 1997’s The Peacemaker while they seem to destroy half of Vienna while trying to flee three vehicles full of Russian terrorists. I guess such elements would be difficult to work into the meter of the song.
Kidman and Clooney are in Vienna as part of a convoluted attempt to intercept nuclear weapons stolen from a decommissioned Russian silo. She is the head of the US president’s “Nuclear Smuggling group”, he’s a high-level military guy of the sort who plays fast and loose with the rules and has a disdain for authority. Do you think they will initially have a strong dislike for each other, only to show signs of a possible impending romance by the end of the film? If you don’t assume this, have you not seen a movie before?
A surprising amount of time passes before we first see either star. The film opens at a church in Bosnia. I don’t know if it is supposed to be a baptism, but it looks like one. All I could think of is the Python The Bishop sketch: “Don’t say the baby’s name!” I thought an explosion was imminent but, instead, somebody we don’t know gets shot outside the church by a cut-rate Antonio Banderas lookalike.
Next, we’re at that Russian missile site, where a deeply suspicious guy in military garb is allowed through a checkpoint. Then he stops and looks back like, “Whew!”. You would think the people at the checkpoint might notice behavior like that. I was just hoping he would yell out, “SUCKERS!”.
I was surprised this guy is a Russian general (not certain of the rank, just that he is somebody high in rank) and is authorized to be part of the process of moving the missiles. Turns out he is part of a splinter group of army guys who are going to steal the missiles for big money.
How they steal these from the train carrying them is interesting. They do this using a second train, which is initially chasing the first. This may be the first time I have ever seen one train chasing another. When the trains end up on parallel tracks, the bad guys swarm the other train, kill all the soldiers inside and take all the missiles bar one. The one left behind gets set to detonate, which it does shortly after colliding head-on with a passenger train.
In a briefing conducted by Kidman, Clooney will point out a satellite photo taken immediately before the detonation shows people leaping off only one of the trains, leading him to conclude everybody on it was already dead. By extension of this, he determines somebody had already stolen most of the weapons before the crash.
In making these observations, Clooney repeatedly interrupts Kidman. This surprised me as the picture is directed by Mimi Leder, a woman (as her name implies). My curiosity in seeking out this movie was because I first learned about it from watching the documentary series Women Make Film. Seems Leder’s film would be better suited for a documentary called Women Make Films Where Men Mansplain and Aren’t Called Out for It.
This is a largely predictable work which rarely strays from a certain template. The characters aren’t very well developed. The action was often so predictable I actually pointed at the screen at the exact moment certain characters were shot or when an explosion occurred. It’s like things happen on a “beat”, just like the steady rhythm of a Krautrock song.
A couple of things I didn’t expect included Clooney phoning a terrorist who is stuck in traffic, a moment that was mildly humorous. Another surprise was something deeply stupid, as an entire security force tries to intercept a suspect in a hotel room and all of the good guys ride up in the same elevator. Nobody took the stairs or the second elevator, nor did they leave anybody in the lobby. For those who have seen a movie before, guess how that turns out.
One thing I find strangest about some movies of this type is there is much frantic activity, with quick cuts between multiple parties, yet it can be as dull as the driest historical drama. In this case, it is a manhunt in downtown Manhattan. Kidman is behind the wheel of a SUV, Clooney and other agents run across the rooftops of cars stuck in traffic and a sniper is on the rooftop, but all this sound and fury added up to no sense of urgency for me. I started to wonder if I had misread the title of the film and I was actually watching The Pacemaker. An overblown score from Hans Zimmer doesn’t help.
The Peacemaker is far from the worst thing I have seen but I can’t recommend it to anybody. Neither Kidman nor Clooney is bad in it, yet there isn’t any real chemistry between them. It is an empty experience and its ending seems to have been stolen from 1950’s Seven Days to Noon, a movie I highly recommend watching instead.
Dir: Mimi Leder
Starring George Clooney, Nicole Kidman
Watched on blu-ray