Hero Moment of The Week – A Hero That Never Got Around to Being Romantic (Dammit!)

I thought I’d revert back to type this week — romantic suspense.

Except that this suspense never got around to being romantic…and by golly it should have!  George Clooney played the role of Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe in the 1997 movie The Peacemaker.

Put the movie on your must-see list, if you’ve never seen it, and skip the spoiler section ahead, because the movie is just great all by itself.  It’s a total nail-biter, and the suspense doesn’t let go for a second.  And this is me saying it: one of those people who is usually so far ahead of the plot she can write out how the movie is going to end, twenty minutes into it.  I had Saw figured out after fifteen minutes.  The Peacemaker was hard to call, and a thrill to watch.  Mimi Leder is one of my all-time favourite directors simply because she makes entertaining movies and TV.  She seems to keep the audience always in mind.

But I’m getting away from my point.

Tom Devoe would have made such a perfect romance hero in this movie, yet he never really had a chance to be romantic.  At the very end of the movie he got to buy the female lead a beer.  Big deal.

~spoiler alert~

All through the movie, though, there was this push-pull chemistry between him and Julia Kelly, played by Nicole Kidman, where she kept treating him like a gung-ho trigger-happy soldier, and he kept treating her like an anal-retentive beauracrat, until each saw the other’s true nature  in explosively high-emotion, high-stress scenes.

The one scene where Devoe’s deliciously alpha hero nature showed up best was when he was in a car chase scene.  He was being pursued by three other cars, trying to save Kelly, and his best friend had just been murdered in front of them.  He goes very icy cold and controlled, kills all the bad guys in some very smart moves despite being radically outnumbered, while Kelly watches in disbelief.  Then he gets out of the car, crosses the plaza, reloads his gun, and shoots the last wounded bad guys in the head to finish the job properly, and walks back to the car.  Tightly wound, calculating, but a cold exterior.

It’s only later he lets go and breaks down, in the privacy of their hotel room.

If ever there was a place in the script for a love scene, that was it.

All through the movie Kelly and Devoe were firing pot shots at each other as they gradually came to understand each other’s characters better…it was the perfect relationship development arc that a romance goes through, in fact, except there was no romance.

I often itch to re-write that story with the romance in it, instead of the stupid offer of a beer at the end. ~sigh~

~end of spoiler alert.~

Of course it helps that George Clooney is too damned good looking for his own reflection, and in this movie he had some serious muscle going on…he must have bulked up and dropped the fat just a bit — not body-builder size, or anything like it, but when he’s doing action scenes, there’s rippling muscles and tendons and that certainly helps keep your attention pinned to the screen!

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