THE PEACEMAKER (55)

Directed by: Mimi Leder

Starring: George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, Marcel Iures

The Pitch: A US intelligence agent tries to recover stolen nuclear warheads from the itchy fingers of international terrorists.

Theo Sez: An attempt at something interesting, a "quality" action movie with a torn-from-the- headlines immediacy and a modicum of political sophistication. It doesn't quite come off, perhaps because everyone still says "Moss-cow" and talks about chateaux in the Loore Valley, but more probably because it doesn't really cut it as an action movie : it loses its way in generic set-pieces like the ticking bomb or the car teetering on the edge of a cliff - and, though the director is more than competent, she's just unable to give them the zing that, say, de Palma brought to similarly musty routines in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. The result is like a slightly more action-packed version of those hefty airport novels by Robert Ludlum or Frederick Forsyth - easily digestible gobs of international intrigue ; which is a shame, for the film intermittently looks like it's about to take the genre to a new level, a Morally Responsible action movie for the caring 90s (and perhaps a Statement of Intent from Spielberg and Co.'s fledgling studio), giving its disgruntled terrorist a wholly credible speech about Western duplicity in Bosnia and making him, if anything, more sympathetic than the hero, whose gung-ho aggression is often made to seem more callous than manly. The moment where he orders a sniper to shoot at the terrorist, knowing (but, apparently, not caring) that a little girl is directly in the line of fire, is a powerful glimpse of the sharp-eyed critique this might have been, and almost is ; made even sweeter by Clooney's apparent inability to recognise (or decision to ignore) the implications of his character.