The Peacemaker

“The Peacemaker” is as generic as the title makes it sound. This is the kind of movie you watch once, don’t really like but don’t hate either and then end up watching again a year later because you’ve forgotten everything about it.

A nuclear detonation in Russia attracts the attention of the U.S. government. A train carrying 10 nuclear warheads has crashed into a passenger train and exploded. Dr. Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman) believes (rightfully so) that terrorists are behind the incident. The straight-laced, by-the-books professional is partnered up with fun-loving, impulsive U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Devoe (George Clooney) to get to the bottom of the nefarious plot.

You’ve seen this film time and time again. At the end of it, I was left wondering why it was even made. There’s nothing original about it. Even the choice of having two people who don’t like each other forced to work on a mystery isn’t new. The screenplay couldn’t even be bothered to mix things up a little by making the woman the flirt and the man the one with a stick up his butt. You’ve got characters as inspired as a child’s drawing of the sun as a yellow circle with lines coming out so the film desperately needed a good villain. Unfortunately, we don’t get one. It’s the same baddie we’ve seen over and over. Marcel Iures plays a nasty that’s been ripped out of countless other movies with terrorists in them: a guy who lost his family due to military action and now wants to get revenge by giving America a piece of its own medicine and blah blah blah. Who cares?

Where “The Peacemaker” earns some points back is in its action sequences. They’re creative and so crazy you are jolted awake from your previous haze of nonchalantness. I wish I had more to say but there’s little else to comment on really. The film isn’t awful. In a way, it’s worse: bland. If it did feature lame special effects or over-the-top performances it would firmly cement itself as memorably bad, but the film is not dreadful to sit through. It’s just not spectacular or even noteworthy in any way whatsoever.

I struggled to decide whether “The Peacemaker” is good or bad. In the end, I don’t think it’s worth going out of your way to see. Not when there are so many other similar, better stories available. Ask me in a month about that movie where George Clooney and Nicole Kidman stop terrorists and I won’t be able to remember whether it was titled “Peacekeeper”, “Peacemaker” or something else. (On VHS, August 12, 2016)