The Peacemaker
film poster
Directed by	Mimi Leder
Written by	Michael Schiffer
Starring	George Clooney Nicole Kidman
Music by	Hans Zimmer
Cinematography	Dietrich Lohmann
Distributed by	DreamWorks
Release date(s)	1997
Running time	124 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Peacemaker is a 1997 thriller and action movie starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. It is notable as being the very first film released by DreamWorks.

Plot summary

When two trains crash in Russia, one of them carrying a nuclear payload, a nuclear explosion follows. White House nuclear expert Dr. Julia Kelly (Kidman) thinks this wasn't an accident and believes that Russian terrorists are behind the incident. She is assigned the smooth talking, irreverent US Army Ranger Intelligence Officer Colonel Thomas Devoe (Clooney), who has Russian contacts and is convinced that the crash was staged to hide the hijacking of the other warheads on board.

Kelly and Devoe try to track down the terrorists through a trucking company which is a front for a criminal syndicate. When the criminals realise they are in fact government agents, they escape, but in the process, Devoe's long time friend and Russian counterpart is killed. When the truck carrying the warheads is located (using a ruse in which Devoe convinces the driver over the phone that there is a smart bomb falling towards him, causing him to turn out of traffic on a road, so that the truck can be seen in an aerial photo) Devoe leads a group of Delta Force operators illegally over the Russian border to seize it.In that operation,three helicopters are used,one of them was shot down by Russian sam battery when they overflew Russian airspace When the truck is seized, it is found that the trigger bomb from one of the warheads is missing. It is learned that the bomb was taken by a Bosnian, and that it is due to be used to destroy the UN building in New York.

One of the terrorists, Dušan Gavrić (Marcel Iureş), is a Yugoslav without identity ("I am a Serb, a Croat, and a Muslim", although he clearly makes the "sign of the Cross" before boarding the plane as a diplomat). He wants to avenge the death of his wife and daughter, who were killed by a sniper in Sniper Alley, Sarajevo. He blames the United Nations for not protecting them and therefore he wants to blow up the United Nations building in New York City. The deouement of the film takes place in a Catholic church, where the wounded Gavrić commits suicide, knowing that the bomb in his rucksack will detonate if Kelly and Devoe try to remove it from him. With seconds to spare, Kelly is able to remove a part of the Beryllium sphere of the bomb, preventing it from triggering a nuclear reaction and limiting the explosion to within the church.

Goofs

• When Kodoroff's truck pulls into the village and Devoe asks the Pakistani where is the other warhead, the Macedonian Cyrillic word КРОЈАЧ is clearly visible on a sign. Although the scene is set in Russia, it was obviously filmed in the Republic of Macedonia, as stated in the end credits.
• The "US Air Force attack helicopters" in George Clooney's combat unit are Aérospatiale Dauphin (or the military variant, the AS565 Panther), which although see combat use in other country's military services, is only used by the United States Coast Guard as the HH-65 Dolphin.

Selected Cast

• George Clooney – as Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe
• Nicole Kidman – as Dr. Julia Kelly
• Marcel Iureş – as Dušan Gavric
• Aleksandr Baluyev – as General Aleksandr Kodoroff
• Rene Medvešek – as Vlado Miric
• Gary Werntz – as Terry Hamilton
• Armin Mueller-Stahl – as Dimitri Vertikoff
• Randall Batinkoff – as Ken