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![]() With The Peacemaker, Dreamworks SKG tries to live up to its own hype -- only to stumble with a smirk. By Zak Weisfeld OCTOBER 6, 1997: Imagine the pressure. After all, they are the top men. Top. Each a wunderkind in his day, now a mature talent in the prime of his manhood. They are like the Three Musketeers, The Justice League of entertainmentThe Director, The Studio Boss, The Record Guyeach with his own talent, each with more money than sub-Saharan Africa. And each day the expectations grow, because eventually, eventually they're going to have to do something more than discuss opening virtual reality theme parks and re-signing washed-up bands to new record contractseventually they are going to have to, as they say in the trade, step up to the plate. They are going to have to release a feature film.
Several years and several hundred million dollars after Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen formed Hollywood's most watched and most talked-about new studio, Dreamworks SKG, the company has finally released its first film, The Peacemaker. Even in a summer not overburdened with good action movies, The Peacemaker can barely blast its way into mediocrity. The Peacemaker takes as its central plotline the boldly original idea of a stolen nuclear weaponground that was well-plowed back in the days when James Bond was still Scottishand grafts on the inventive characters of the maverick soldier/agent and the beautiful but brainy nuclear physicist. All that's missing is the charm, sense of fun, and semi-coherent plotting in order for The Peacemaker to be a forgettable, Timothy Dalton-era Bond film. That the viewer is going to suffer is apparent from the unending title sequencethe boredom of its stalled pacing is brought to a fever pitch by Hans Zimmer's relentlessly dramatic score. It is an ominous prophecy fulfilled with the introduction of the main characters and the first of a multitude of glaring plot holes and incomprehensibilities (they ship nuclear weapons on steam trains?).
Luckily, I don't have to conceal it at all. I realized, while watching The Peacemaker, that Clooney is the Tom Selleck of the '90s, minus the warmth (and the mustache). While he makes a fine Dr. Doug, Clooney's range is binarythere's the smirk and the sulk, and that's about all she wrote. He lacks the gravity to pull off even as banal a role as the quasi-tortured Devoe. And with the colossal failure of his Batman and the poor prospects of The Peacemaker, I wouldn't be surprised to see Clooney next make it to the big screen in Quigley Down Under II.
The Peacemaker? All the hype, all the stories, all the lawyers, all the waitingfor The Peacemaker? It's as though Plato, Kant, and Hegel got together and wrote Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, or if McCartney, Harrison, and Starr got together and wrote... Looking back, it's strange that there were any expectations at all. Spielberg, once lauded as America's storyteller, has been riding computer-generated bluster and Oscar cachet for half a decade. With the exception of Schindler's List, he hasn't made a great movie since the first Indiana Jones. Jeffrey Katzenberg got famous for being a tightwad who stumbled across our almost limitless desire to subject our children to the slick, musical pabulum of Disney cartoons. And Geffen? Whatever. The truth is, The Peacemaker in all its unholy blandness is exactly what we should have hoped for from the portentously titled threesome at Dreamworks. Together they have dreamed the immortal dream of Hollywooda good opening weekend and a strong international box office.
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