George Clooney hasn’t been shy in admitting that he thought his prospects of securing genuine leading man status in Hollywood were dead on arrival following the disastrous reception afforded to Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, which makes it very easy to forget he headlined another big budget blockbuster just three months later when The Peacemaker landed in theaters.
He was even reunited with another Dark Knight disappointment for good measure, with Batman Forever‘s half-baked love interest Chase Meridian herself sharing top billing. Clooney and Nicole Kidman star as an army colonel and a nuclear scientist who end up being paired up to thwart an imminent attack, after a bomb goes missing following a train crash in Russia.
Reviews weren’t exactly through the roof – with director Mimi Leder’s hot-button tale of espionage and intrigue holding respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 46 and 39 percent from critics and crowds – but the $50 million feature did manage to recoup its budget twice over and then some at the box office, ensuring that maybe Clooney wasn’t going to be dubbed a “TV actor” for life after all.
Even now, more than a quarter of a century on from its debut, The Peacemaker has proven itself a title worthy of being revisited on streaming, with FlixPatrol naming it as one of the most-watched films on the iTunes global charts. Lost in the backdraft of Batman & Robin wasn’t what it deserved, but at least it’s on the way to securing some sort of legacy as an unheralded and arguably underrated slab of glossy entertainment.
