The Peacemaker (1997 film)

The Peacemaker is a 1997 American political action thriller film starring George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Marcel Iureș and Aleksandr Baluev and directed by Mimi Leder. It is the first film by DreamWorks Pictures. While the story takes place all over the world, it was shot primarily in Slovakia with some sequences filmed in New York City and Philadelphia.[2]

The Peacemaker
Theatrical release poster
Directed byMimi Leder
Screenplay byMichael Schiffer
Based onOne Point Safe
by Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Redlich Cockburn
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyDietrich Lohmann
Edited byDavid Rosenbloom
Music byHans Zimmer
Production
company
Distributed byDreamWorks Pictures
Release date
  • September 26, 1997 (1997-09-26)
Running time
124 minutes
CountryUnited States
Languages
  • English
  • Russian
  • Serbo-Croatian
Budget$50 million[1]
Box office$110.4 million[1]

The basis for the film was the 1997 book One Point Safe, about the state of Russia's nuclear arsenal.[3]

Plot

Outside a church celebrating an Eastern Orthodox baptism in Pale, Bosnia, the Bosnian Finance Minister, a moderate pushing for peace in the ongoing Yugoslav Wars, is murdered.

At a missile base in Kartaly (Chelyabinsk Oblast), Russia, ten R-36M2 Mod. 5, 550–750 kiloton MIRV nuclear warheads that belong to a SS-18 Satan ICBM are loaded onto a train for transport to a dismantling facility. However, Russian Army General Aleksandr Kodoroff, along with a rogue Spetznaz unit, kills the soldiers on board the transport train and transfers nine of the warheads to another train. Kodoroff then activates the timer on the remaining warhead and sends the transport on a collision course with a passenger train. Minutes later, the 500-kiloton warhead detonates, killing thousands of civilians and delaying an investigation of the accident.

The detonation immediately attracts the attention of the US government. Dr. Julia Kelly, head of the National Security Council Nuclear Smuggling Group, believes that Chechen terrorists are behind the incident. Former US Army Ranger and Special Forces turned Military Intelligence Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Devoe interrupts her briefing to suggest that the incident was staged to hide the hijacking of the warheads. A call to Devoe's friend and Russian counterpart, FSB Colonel Dimitri Vertikoff, adds reliability to his theory and he is assigned as Kelly's military liaison.

Kelly and Devoe secure information about the terrorist's hijacking operation through an Austrian trucking company that works as a front for the Russian Mafia. They meet Vertikoff in Vienna, then they assume identities to visit Shummaker, who organizes the Russian's trucking. After Devoe tortures Shummaker for information, he and Kelly leave the building and get in Vertikoff's car. They are chased through Vienna by Shumaker's men, who kill Vertikoff while he's offering a bribe. Devoe shoots at the attackers and drives away, but finds he and Kelly are being followed. A chase through the city ensues, followed by a fiery crash, but Devoe and Kelly escape.

Information from the trucking company says that the nukes are going to Iran via a route through Azerbaijan. When US spy satellites place the truck in a traffic jam of refugees in Dagestan, Devoe uses a ruse to identify it. This information is passed on to Russian authorities in hopes of stopping the transfer to Iran. The Russian military stops Kodoroff at a roadblock, but he and his men kill the soldiers.

Devoe leads an airborne Special Operations team from a U.S. base in Turkey to stop them. Denied entry into Russian airspace, one of the three Special Ops helicopters is shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile, but the remaining two manage to locate Kodoroff's truck. They fire missiles which disable Kodoroff's truck, then engage in a gunfight, killing Kodoroff and securing the warheads. However, interrogation of the surviving member of the group, a U.S.-educated Pakistani nuclear scientist, reveals that one warhead had been sent off with an operative before the truck was intercepted.

The information from the trucking company leads IFOR to a Sarajevo address. Inside is a video cassette of a Bosnian named Dušan Gavrić, who disclaims allegiance to any particular faction in the Yugoslav Wars, but blames other countries for supplying weapons to all sides in the war. Kelly's further analysis of the trucking company documents suggests that Gavrić intends to bomb a meeting at the UN headquarters in New York City. Gavrić arrives in Manhattan with the Bosnian diplomatic delegation, having replaced the murdered Finance Minister.

A flashback shows that Gavrić wants to avenge the death of his wife and daughter, who were killed in Sarajevo during a sniper attack. He and his brother are later found by Devoe and Kelly. When his brother is killed by Devoe, a wounded and enraged Gavrić flees into a parochial school. Devoe and Kelly confront Gavrić, who commits suicide, knowing that the bomb is set to go off in a matter of minutes. With only seconds to spare, Dr. Kelly is able to remove part of the explosive lens shell of the bomb and to stop the primary explosion from establishing critical mass within the plutonium core. The primary explosives detonate, wrecking the church, as Devoe and Kelly dive out of a window, but Kelly's efforts prevent it from causing a nuclear explosion.

After the nuclear incident is over, Kelly is seen swimming laps in a pool. Devoe stops by and asks her out for a drink, which she accepts.

Cast

Production

The Peacemaker is inspired by an unpublished Vanity Fair article written by journalists Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Redlich Cockburn.[4] The film marked the inaugural release from DreamWorks Pictures [4] George Clooney had initially been set to do a Green Hornet movie at Universal Pictures starring alongside Jason Scott Lee with Sam Raimi directing, but as Dreamworks' co-founder Steven Spielberg's other company Amblin Television produced ER, Clooney opted to sign on for The Peacemaker.[4]

Release

Box office

The Peacemaker earned $41,263,140 in the US and $69,200,000 elsewhere, bringing its total to $110,463,140.[1]

Critical reception

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 46% approval rating based on 37 reviews, with an average score of 6/10.[5] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 43 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[6] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[7]

Janet Maslin of The New York Times gave praise to Clooney and Kidman for portraying a "charming rogue" and expressing "womanly professionalism as fierce, hostile sterneness" in their respective roles and Leder's direction of the movie's action setpieces, highlighting the Manhattan climax for having "crisp economy and furious energy" throughout the scene.[8] Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle said that despite the "ever-present plot holes and isoscelean character arcs" throughout the film's story and villains, he praised Leder's directorial skills for keeping things fresh throughout the runtime and adding "clever swagger" to the action scenes, concluding that: "By no means an embarrassment to the fledgling DreamWorks, The Peacemaker is instead a grand, noisy step in the right direction. What next, indeed?"[9] Roger Ebert commended the "technical credits" and both Clooney and Kidman for expertly fulfilling their roles but felt the rest of the film was filled with "retreaded" and "off-the-shelf" thriller clichés and concluded with a bomb defusal third act that lacked the "real endings involving character developments and surprises" found in similar films like The Edge and Kiss the Girls.[10] Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman gave the film an overall "C+" grade, giving Leder's direction credit for staging her scenes with "crisp exactitude, [and with] a pleasing flair for "rhythmic" visual detail" and adding "elegant and accomplished" atmospherics, but felt that it amounts to being "a well-crafted, utterly generic genre piece" that carries "an air of self-important solemnity that borders on the overblown", concluding that: "In The Peacemaker, nothing escapes the taint of cliche. As the inaugural feature from DreamWorks, the picture is vaguely depressing, because it suggests that the studio’s creators are working so laboriously to manufacture a hit that they’ve forgotten to put in the dream."[11] James Berardinelli criticized the over-long runtime of the movie's "paper-thin plot", the "lack of creativity" in the death scenes and failing to sympathize with the villains' plight, concluding that: "The Peacemaker isn't much better or worse than the average James Bond movie, except, of course, that it doesn't have the cars, the gadgets, the girls, or Bond himself. There's a certain appeal to the premise, but the execution is uneven. The movie is likely to keep an audience's attention, but it's the kind of film that is quickly forgotten."[12]

References
  1. "The Peacemaker". Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on November 18, 2018. Retrieved March 29, 2007.
  2. "Peacemaker: Filming Locations". MovieLoci.com. April 5, 2004. Archived from the original on February 25, 2021. Retrieved July 17, 2004.
  3. Schmitt, Eric (October 19, 1997). "Clearance Sale". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 26, 2021. Retrieved September 4, 2021.
  4. "DreamWorks woos Clooney from U for 'Peacemaker'". Variety. Retrieved September 25, 2022.
  5. "The Peacemaker (1997)". Rotten Tomatoes. Archived from the original on April 8, 2022. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
  6. "The Peacemaker (1997) Reviews". Metacritic. Archived from the original on August 13, 2021. Retrieved October 17, 2009.
  7. "CinemaScore". cinemascore.com. Archived from the original on 2019-12-14. Retrieved 2017-10-17.
  8. Maslin, Janet (September 26, 1997). "The Cold War Is Back, Nuclear Bombs and All". The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 4, 2021. Retrieved September 4, 2021.
  9. Savlov, Marc (September 26, 1997). "The Peacemaker - Movie Review". The Austin Chronicle. Archived from the original on September 4, 2021. Retrieved September 4, 2021.
  10. Ebert, Roger (September 26, 1997). "The Peacemaker". Chicago Sun-Times. Sun-Times Media Group. Archived from the original on January 21, 2021. Retrieved September 4, 2021 – via RogerEbert.com.
  11. Gleiberman, Owen (October 3, 1997). "The Peacemaker". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on April 14, 2021. Retrieved September 5, 2021.
  12. Berardinelli, James. "Peacemaker, The (United States, 1997)". Reelviews. Archived from the original on January 21, 2021. Retrieved September 4, 2021.
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