The Peacemaker

A US Army colonel and a civilian woman supervising him must track down stolen Russian nuclear weapons before they’re used by terrorists.

• Director:Mimi Leder
• Genre:Action / Thriller
• Runtime:119 minutes

Cast

George Clooney: Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe
Nicole Kidman : Dr. Julia Kelly
Marcel Iures : Dusan Gavrich
Aleksandr Baluyev : General Aleksandr Kodoroff (as Alexander Baluev)
Rene Medvesek : Vlado Mirich

The movie begins in an Eastern Orthodox church in Pale, Bosnia, when an unidentified man (later revealed to be a Bosnian diplomat to the UN) is murdered in an alley after receiving a page to meet someone outside.

The scene then immediately shifts to a missile base in Chelyabinsk, Russia, where SS-18 ICBM’s are being decommissioned. Ten nuclear warheads are loaded onto a train and sent to a separate site for dismantling. However, a high-ranking Russian general has other plans. Along with a rogue tactical unit, he kills all the soldiers onboard the train and then transfers nine of the warheads to another train. He also sets the timer on the one remaining warhead, then switches tracks to send his train out of harm’s way and the transport train on a collision course with a passenger train. A few minutes later the trains collide. The thermonuclear warhead goes off moments later, yielding a blast about 500 kilotons in intensity. This immediately garners the attention of the US government.

Even though the detonation was staged to look like an accident, White House nuclear expert Dr. Julia Kelly (Kidman) is not convinced: SS-18 warheads can only be detonated deliberately. She believes that terrorists are behind the incident. Her newly assigned military liason disagrees with her. He is smooth-talking and irreverent US Army Special Forces officer Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Devoe (Clooney), and he is convinced that the crash and the detonation were both staged, to hide the hijacking of the other warheads on board. A call to Devoe’s long time friend and Russian counterpart, Dmitri Vertekoff (Armin Mueller-Stahl), adds credence to his hypothesis.

Kelly and Devoe try to track down the terrorists through an Austrian trucking company which is a front for the Russian Mafia. When the Mafia realizes they are in fact U.S. government agents, they send out several carloads of thugs to kill them. Vertekoff is killed, but Kelly and Devoe escape, with Devoe killing most of the would-be assassins in the process. Devoe later finds out through the tracking system of the truck company that the nukes are in a truck headed to Iran. 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. After the only Russian troops in the area are killed by the general and his men, Devoe leads a group of USAF Special Operations and Army Rangers illegally over the Russian border to seize it. During the operation, one of their choppers is shot down by Russian SAM battery when they enter Russian airspace, but the remaining choppers evade the missiles and are able to stop the truck carrying the warheads. A savage fight ensues onboard the vehicle, and the rogue Russian general is killed and the warheads are seized. Interrogation of the one surviving member of the group reveals that the trigger bomb (nominal yield: 1-2 kilotons) from one of the warheads is missing. It is learned that the bomb was taken by a Bosnian, and that it may be intended to destroy the UN headquarters in New York. Read more

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