Well here we go, two different spies looks at PEACEMAKER, the first film by those three cool film dudes. What type of film did these 3 choose to unleash on us first? Well from the looks of things a pretty good one. A solid action spy film from these guys/gals/thingies' reviews. However, it is not the second coming of great coolness, at least in their eyes. Who knows I might love it something fierce. Then again maybe I won't. Judge for yourself. Personally I'm going if for no other reason than to see the DreamWorks logo on the big screen and the long rumored PRINCE OF EGYPT trailer teaser. So have fun with the reviews, and there are some SPOILERS but I personally feel no ruining info was there, but if you are sensitive to spoilers then don't.
PeaceMaker via "The Dude Who See It"
The Peacemaker Dreamworks first movie, "The Peacemaker" is about men. Sure Nicole Kidman's in more than three quarters of the scenes, but with the exception of a few extras with a line or two, she's the only one in this flick.
Which is strange when you think about the fact that it's directed by a woman. Mimi Leder's film debut (she's done lot's of TV) is very auspicious, this is the best summer movie of autumn.
Michael Schiffer's screenplay is probably the first film to actually get the politics of early 21st century Europe right. The politics of post-Soviet eastern Europe are made somewhat more intelligible than most other recent action adventure flick. But as an action flick, this is about blowing up stuff, and this it does with abandon.
The first thing to go boom is central Russia. The evil General Kodoroff(Alexander Baluev) steals eleven nuclear warheads from a moving train and uses the twelfth to cover his tracks. This alerts the US defence department(aboveground nuclear explosions are hard to hide after all). The white house is in a panic, and the acting head of the nuclear antiterrorism unit, Dr Julia Kelley (Nicole Kidman) is put on the case, much to her shagrin. When asked what she wants from the military, she replies "Someone who will take orders from a woma.
What she gets instead is Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe (George Clooney) America's very own James Bond. We first meet him trying to explain why he runs five thousand dollar bar tabs and is using our tax dollars to send minivans to eastern Europe as bribes. This is how he should have acted in "Batman!" He saunters in to Kelly's briefing to the brass and basically says everything she's saying is wrong. When he arrives as her "military leasion" she isn't pleased . It's the "Lockhorns save the world" from here on out.
The high-tech wizardry of US intelligence is omnipotent, here, and it's lots of fun. Devoe discovers that General Kodoroff is on the passenger list for the train that was nuked, and then checks celphone records to discover that he was calling his mistress in Finland! The chase is on!
First stop Vienna, where Kelly and Devoe meet the latters Russian counterpart and drinking buddy Dmitri Verticoff(Armin Mueller-Stahl) who fills them in and acts as their chauffeur while they go and rough up a baddie and steal his secret information on where the truck with the warheads might be. Devoe is recognized by the Austrian equivalent of Lexus-Nexus and soon our heroes are surrounded by enemy Mercedes-Benzes. Verticoff is killed and the obligatory high speed chase begins and quickly becomes a game of demolition derby. CRASH! BANG! Wholesome fun for the whole family!
Meanwhile... Ducan Garivitch(Marcel Iures) is a Bosnian Serb who lost his wife and daughter in the war and wants revenge. Vlado Mirich(Rene Medvesek), his best friend, is in cahoots with General Kodoroff, and is taking one bomb for himself while the general takes the rest to Iran.
Will our heroes find the warheads and save the world? Of course, but getting there is most of the fun! There are so many things yet to blow up! So many baddies to defeat, so many bridges to hang from.
But to Michael Schiffer's credit, we see Nicole Kidman actually agonizing over the body count. Something you would never see in a James Bond flick. Fun fun fun.
PEACEMAKER via the Wombat
Man, I have Wombats writing me, that's scary as hell. But once again this fella liked PEACEMAKER!!! Hmmm, we'll see. Overcoming weak trailers is awful hard even for a great film. The audience has to see and be intrigued by the trailer campaign, and as this AICN reader will atest, he/she/it thought the film was going to be weak as hell from the ad campaign. I'm excited, I'm there. I like Clooney and hope this one will bury the criticisms from BATMAN & ROBIN, which wasn't his fault. You should go into this film giving George a blank slate in my opinion. I will.
Caught a sneak of "The Peacemaker" last night, and was pleasantly surprised. The trailers for this one made it look like a weak film. Turns out to be a pretty snappy thriller, fast-paced, usually well-plotted, with some terrific action sequences and a few nice one-liners. Clooney is good, though in the early scenes, he overplays his boyish-rogue bit for a guy who's supposed to be a colonel (in one scene, he snaps at a general to "get offa that phone". Uh-huh.) Kidman's strong, too, and she's much more than just "the girl", which is really refreshing to see. All the action sequences are top-notch, particularly one involving what Joe Bob Briggs would term "car-fu" -- you see a snippet of this one in the trailer -- and the finale. A few caveats: While the movie as a whole seems well thought-out, there are a handful of dumb plot devices to get from one point to the next (including *mild spoiler* a confusing part where the same snippet of code conveniently leads to two different places; you'll know what I'm talking about when you see the movie.) Some of the early scenes are depressingly by the book -- including the opening scene, which is, I believe, obligatory these days for cold-war thrillers (* spoiler, though it isn't one if you've seen more than two of these movies* the opening scene has a foreign dignitary in a church. His beeper goes off, and he steps outside to answer it. A man steps out of the shadows, greets the dignitary as a friend, and then shoots him to death with a silenced pistol. Sound familiar?) And the movie's efforts to humanize its villain -- first with some piano playing, and later on with a spectacularly ill-timed flashback sequence -- really should have been left on the cutting-room floor, or at least blended into the flick a tad more seamlessly. As they stand, they might as well have huge flashing labels that say, "We're stopping the movie now to give the villain some depth, okay?". But overall, the movie's a pretty rare breed -- a fairly intelligent, intense, well-acted thriller.
