Don Shanahan
Noted as the inaugural theatrical release of DreamWorks Pictures in 1997, The Peacemaker was selected by Kino Lorber for the 4K-UHD treatment. A new two-disc set of Deep Impact director Mimi Leder’s thriller starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman arrives on store shelves June 24th as part of Kino Lorber’s “Studio Classics” specialty label. Film Obsessive was generously sent an advanced copy of the 4K-UHD disc release and added this review of the film and its materials to our site’s “Off the Shelf” series. Come and revisit how realistic and paranoid cinematic terrorism looked before everything changed four years later.
THE MOVIE
Despite the red carpet excitement of christening a new major player in Hollywood, The Peacemaker had the unenviable task of following George Clooney’s loudly reviled turn as Bruce Wayne and Batman in the campy summer sequel Batman and Robin. As quickly as he was branded a hot Hollywood commodity riding his massive success on TV’s E.R., George became the butt of endless jokes, meaning the press push for The Peacemaker needed its share of PR Windex to clean off smudged crystal.
The Peacemaker was based on the 1997 book One Point Safe, written by national security journalist and Harper’s Bazaar editor Andrew Cockburn and his wife, investigative journalist Leslie Cockburn. The focus was on the state of the Russian nuclear arsenal after the fall of the Soviet Union. When a Russian army general (Aleksandr Baluev) steals ten ICBM nuclear warheads queued for dismantling and sets one off to cover his escape, the governments of the world turn their attention to the other nine. Representing the U.S. government’s nuclear smuggling group, Dr. Julia Kelly (Kidman) suspects Chechen terrorists while military intelligence Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Devoe (Clooney) contradicts her, claiming the detonation was set off to cover the tracks of further hijacking.
Because both are equipped with the right expertise to execute this investigation, even with different theories, Dr. Kelly and Lt. Col. Devoe are assigned to partner together as liaisons to figure out the truth and secure the missing warheads. This union leads to the best line of the movie uttered by Kidman, which sets the level of urgency for The Peacemaker:
“I’m not afraid of the man who wants ten nuclear weapons, Colonel. I’m terrified of the man who only wants one.”
That man in The Peacemaker becomes Dušan Gavrić, played by Romanian theater actor Marcel Iureș. Gavrić is a Bosnian War survivor who lost his entire family and blames the foreign countries that provided the weapons and munitions for his country’s tragic civil war. The film’s globetrotting case leads to Manhattan, where Gavrić has one perilous and activated warhead strapped to his back with the intention of bombing the United Nations headquarters.
The film only made a shade over $41 million domestically, against a $50 million budget. It performed better overseas with a $69 million haul, allowing it to finish in the black before home video sales and rental revenue. Still, The Peacemaker is viewed by many as high-profile example of a mixed reception between audiences and critics, carrying a 47% “rotten” score on Rotten Tomatoes and a mild “B+” grade from the public masses on Cinemascore. Had thise film come out in May or June of 1997 before Batman and Robin, the reception and profits may have been drastically different. The Peacemaker was E.R. Emmy winner Mimi Leder’s feature directorial debut, hired by Steven Spielberg himself. She would stay at DreamWorks for great success with Deep Impact before being cast back to television after Pay It Forward underperformed.
Where The Peacemaker holds up is in its casting and its themes. George Clooney fit his squared-jaw part as a savvy man-in-uniform to a tee. Nicole Kidman was granted an intelligent lead role that kept her an expert and never a tart or pretty face. She, too, was in the process of washing off her own Batman stink after playing the dish Chase Meridian to be seen as a viable, bankable, and serious actress. While romance is briefly entertained at the very end of The Peacemaker, the gravity of the business at hand stays front-and-center with tight pacing and a busy array of passport stamps to cover the globe.
As a pre-9/11 terrorism thriller, one that coincidentally had to be pulled from the ABC primetime movie schedule the very week of September 11th, The Peacemaker maintains an admirable plot that prioritizes realism over the grandstanding, which was a popular approach of the era. Back in those late 1990s in similar movies like Blown Away, The Siege, and Arlington Road (the hidden gem best of the bunch), Hollywood had a way of pushing the domestic paranoia (syn) to its this-could-really-happen limits before taking one big showy cinematic leap over that line towards something preposterous for blockbuster-sized impression and effect. Even with busy urban shooting locations and its handful of stunt sequences, Mimi Leder’s film never veers towards that shock value or overindulgence, and it’s a stronger film for it. If anything, The Peacemaker and its dated post-Cold War and post-Yugoslav Wars elements still have prescient parallels to today’s geopolitical landscape and our current international conflicts. History deserves to be kinder to this film.
THE DISC
As per the company’s trend with this refined “Studio Classics,” Kino Lorber’s The Peacemaker comes with a new 4K-UHD disc and the film on Blu-ray disc format as well. Color enhancement and noise cleanup on the 4K-UHD from the original 35mm camera negative source are very noticeable from its original DVD form. The blacks and shadows seep in very well. The superior disc is also engineered for Dolby Vision sound and DTS. The menus are very plain with typed headings over a splash image and soundtrack of composer Hans Zimmer’s score motif.
The original DVD release of The Peacemaker and its later Blu-ray disc release were embarrassingly bare of meaty special features. At the time, all that accompanied those editions were a five-and-a-half minute stunt featurette, a three-minute compilation of deleted and gag scenes, and a basic trailer (expanded to a handful here to include Eastern Promises, The General’s Daughter, Ronin, and the the Clooney/Kidman-centric Out of Sight and The Interpreter). As the first DreamWorks release, made in the greatest age of physical media with a wide expanse to bathe a presentation in showmanship, those two morsels were weak even by weak’s standards.
Luckily for this new 4K-UHD edition, The Peacemaker finally gets some proper words and examination put to it. The Kino Lorber set features two entirely new commentary tracks available on both discs in the set. The first features film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson. The professional duo has been tabbed by Kino Lorber before for commentaries on Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, and several Clint Eastwood classics. They are a very balanced pair, well-prepared with researched nuggets about the film’s construction and its themes. The second commentary track is performed by The Insider film journalist Laurence Lerman, the former editor of Variety’s former DVD trade publication Video Business. His commentary plays more towards The Peacemaker’s bellwether place in the side of the business dealing with studios and stars. Both conversations are very insightful, keenly aware of the post-War on Terror times this movie aged into, and count as wise additions from what used to be a nearly empty plate.
