PEACEMAKER

Derivative of many of the most successful action adventure films, THE PEACEMAKER is a taut, tense tale of international terrorism which tries to pull all the right emotional strings, but is marred by excessive violence and foul language. Owing much of its pedigree to James Bond, THE PEACEMAKER tells the story of a Russian general who steals 10 nuclear warheads in order to make his fortune in a crumbling post-soviet society.

Prefacing the theft of warheads, the movie opens with a baptism at an Orthodox church in Bosnia where a delegate to the Bosnian Parliament is cruelly assassinated. Then the story cuts to the nuclear warheads being loaded onto an old steam train, with the Russian guards grumbling that the Americans are forcing them to destroy their weapons. As the train, full of soldiers guarding the warheads, chugs through the Ural Mountains, it is being chased by a slick diesel, occupied by 21st century pirates, replete with the latest weaponry and night vision paraphernalia. The smugglers board the steam train, assassinate all the soldiers except for the one who was in cahoots with the pirates and neatly off-load the nuclear weapons as the two trains speed down the track.

Before they finish their work on the steam train, the smugglers start a timer on one of the warheads and then shunt the train onto another track where it is sure to collide with an unsuspecting passenger train, several miles down the track. Collide it does, killing and maiming innocent passengers who are eating, sleeping and breast feeding their children. A few minutes later, the nuclear warhead explodes, killing thousands throughout the region.

Meanwhile, back in Washington D.C., scientist Dr. Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman) is called out of a National Security Council meeting to hear that the 10 warheads are missing. From the Satellite reconnaissance photographs, she deduces that the weapons were not destroyed in the collision but stolen because the warhead did not go off at the moment the trains collided, but a few moments later. She is given charge of a special unit to find and recover the remaining warheads. A wheeler-dealer soldier, U.S. Army Special Forces Lt. Colonel Thomas Devoe (George Clooney), who has just finished testifying before a Congressional committee because he bribed Russian military officers, is assigned to her unit.

When Julia and Tom travel to Vienna to track down the warheads, Julia is shocked that Tom’s technique of gathering information boils down to beating the tar out of unwilling suspects. After they extract information on the truck which may be carrying the weapons, they get into one of the most gruesome car chases in film history wherein Tom decides not to escape the bad guys, but punish them mercilessly with his car. Revenge has seldom been so intense.

Back in Washington, the American satellites pinpoint a convoy of trucks which might contain the smugglers. Using high tech expertise, Tom calls the Russian general on his cellular phone and angers the renegade general to such a degree that the general pulls his truck out of the convoy. Tom and Julia watch the satellite video on their computer as the truck pulls away from the convoy − an incredible technological feat.

Tom quickly organizes a group of soldiers to illegally fly helicopters into Russian air space to recover the weapons. After numerous battles with Russian air defense and the bad guys, Tom and his army secure eight warheads and get rid of the renegade general, but they are shocked to find that one warhead is missing, having been smuggled out of Russia by a Bosnian terrorist. Quickly, they deduce (perhaps by reading the script) that the Bosnian terrorist is on his way to blow up the United Nations in Manhattan, New York, and so a second chase begins.

This is a very well-directed adventure flick. Clooney and Kidman do a good job together. Like MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, there are some plot points which seem if not impossible, highly improbable. The movie tries to tug at all the right emotions. It opens with a baptism at an Orthodox church before cutting to the Russian theft of weapons, and it closes in a beautiful church sanctuary in Manhattan. It has poignant scenes of beloved family members caught in a crossfire − scenes which help the audience to contemplate, if not share, the desire for revenge.

Regrettably, all these emotional moments are dissipated beneath the withering barrage of violent deaths and vile profanities and obscenities. Throughout the first part of the film, the audience is swept away by the action and the emotion, but, after a while, the intensity of the action starts to numb the senses, as it did in DIE HARD II and TERMINATOR II. However, this is not a sequel. It is the ground breaking film from DreamWorks, and so a little more attention to character development and story would have been appropriate for setting up the tale of THE PEACEMAKER.