THE PEACEMAKER (DreamWorks) Starring: George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, Marcel Iures, Alexander Baluev, Armin Mueller-Stahl. Screenplay: Michael Schiffer. Producers: Walter Parkes and Branko Lustig. Director: Mimi Leder. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence) Running Time: 122 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Here's an easy short-hand for thinking about THE PEACEMAKER: it's a James Bond film without James Bond. The protagonist, U.S. Army intelligence officer Col. Tom DeVoe (George Clooney), is a man of action with contacts around the globe (Armin Mueller-Stahl plays his Russian Felix Leiter). His partner is a beautiful and determined woman, nuclear specialist Dr. Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman). Their adversary is a nationalist from the former Yugoslavia (Marcel Iures) who has gotten hold of a nuclear warhead. Their search for the missing nuke takes DeVoe and Kelly from Vienna to the Iranian border to New York City. Okay, so there's no sex and no vodka martinis, but THE PEACEMAKER comes with virtually everything else you could ask for in an espionage thriller: superbly crafted action sequences, a charismatic hero, marvelous production values, the threat of mass destruction, humor and style. At times, it's as satisfying an action film as 1997 has produced to date.
That's bound to come as a surprise considering the folks both behind and in front of the camera. THE PEACEMAKER marks the feature directing debut of Mimi Leder (previously on duty as a director for "ER", including the Emmy-nominated "Love's Labor Lost" episode), but she shows no signs of rookie jitters. Her sense of timing an action scene, ably assisted by editor David Rosenbloom, creates tension in unlikely places; her instinct for effective restraint (like the positively heretical decision to show two trains hurtling towards one another, then cut away before the collision) is uncommon and welcome. Leder instantly distinguishes herself as a big-screen action director to watch for.
George Clooney, meanwhile, has previously distinguished himself on the big screen largely by not distinguishing himself, disappearing into the frenetic horror of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN and the inane vortex that was BATMAN & ROBIN. In THE PEACEMAKER, he's a roguish hero with an edge. DeVoe displays an often ruthless military pragmatism, yet his very refusal to play politics gives many of his comic lines their bite. He's an international enforcer as Sean Connery used to play it: with a twinkle in his eye and a hand at your throat.
He's no Bond, of course, which points out the one glaring deficiency keeping THE PEACEMAKER from being a great action film. The Bond films' awareness of their own high-flying absurdity forced them to avoid self-importance, while also making it easy for viewers to overlook mediocre scripts. Not only is Michael Schiffer's screenplay for THE PEACEMAKER too serious by half, it feels only half-finished. Instead of an arrogantly megalomaniacal villain, or even an appealingly insane one, Schiffer offers a somber, haunted Bosnian surrounded by the somber, haunted ruins of Sarajevo. Leder adds a touch of irony with a passing shot of Sarajevo's Olympic rings, at least momentarily defusing the impression that THE PEACEMAKER is trying to Make a Political Statement. As for the characters...let's just call them functional. There's a mechanical feel to the narrative flow of THE PEACEMAKER; it moves from place to place or person to person with little connective tissue to hold it all together. It's an action machine, albeit an extremely well-oiled one.
Well-oiled action machines are rare enough that THE PEACEMAKER could find a receptive audience, perhaps the same audience anxiously awaiting James Bond's next adventure. Operating without a compelling script or the built-in goodwill which accompanies the planet's most famous secret agent, Mimi Leder and company manage to create a worthy challenger. With competition like Bond, it's impressive that Leder was neither shaken nor stirred.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Bond-ed deliveries: 7.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the MoviePage for details, or reply to this message with subject line "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews