Review of The Peacekeeper (1997) by Darren D — 14 Jan 2008

Peacekeeper (1997) is a B grade action movie set in a nuclear missile silo starring Dolph Lundgren and has the following tagline: "Mass destruction just met its match.".

Dolph Lundgren is also one of my favourite action movie stars because he is an actor you can laugh at. That is not meant to be a personal dig; I admire the man tremendously for his academic achievements in chemical engineering and ability to speak several languages and direct his own movies. He also has personal military experience, a martial arts talent in karate and has had active involvement in Olympic sport. Dolph is one the great muscle men of the 1980s who epitomized the mood of the decade in films like Rocky IV or He-Man.

But unlike van Damme, Dolph seems (particularly here) a bit too tall and cumbersome to move around with any athletic grace but rather he runs like the robot Kryten from Red Dwarf. He is pretty good however just playing a muscle man firing a machinegun from the hip and speaking robotic one-liners like, "I must break you." Dolph's characters are typically indestructible: in Peacekeeper he can sustain pistol shots to the chest and fall six floors from a hotel balcony into some garbage cans in the street below without causing any serious injury at all.

Plot? When a terrorist group steals the US President's personal communications computer for launching the US arsenal in case of war, only heroic Major Frank Cross has any chance of averting a nuclear holocaust.

Sound familiar? Many readers on IMDB described this movie as a "Die Hard Clone". I saw more resemblance to The Rock (1996).

The plot is typical and the dialogue OK especially when the James-Bond-type-villain (who cannot bleed somehow) invites the President (Roy Scheider no less) to truly "serve his country" by blowing his brains out and saving millions of American lives from nuclear destruction.

The action is bog standard for the most part but the roof-hopping car chase sequence is pure B-movie brilliance. Once locked inside the silo with the terrorists Dolph must shut down the missiles and has the help of an surviving member of the staff who just so happened to have designed this whole missile complex by himself and has an intimate knowledge of tunnels and air vents that he can guide Dolph around over a walkie-talkie.

A must watch for Dolph fans and general B-Movie lovers.