Bovie Movie

The first motion picture produced by DreamWorks SKG, The Peacemaker (1997) was a spy thriller that married the exotic locations and derring-do of James Bond with the high-tech obsession and post-Cold War politics of Tom Clancy. Greedy Russian military officers crash two trains into each other, the warheads aboard one causing a nuclear blast. The accident is a cover for the theft of some of the weapons for sale to terrorists and rogue governments. In the U.S., intelligence officer Lt. Col. Tom Devoe (George Clooney), isn’t fooled. Neither is Dr. Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman), the acting head of a White House task force on nuclear smuggling. Devoe and Kelly team up to find the nukes, and they are able to stop the transfer of the weapons in a raid at the Iranian border, but one warhead is missing. It’s in the hands of Dusan Gavrich (Marcel Iures), a grief-stricken terrorist planning to call the world’s attention to the war in the former Soviet Union with a nuclear explosion in Manhattan. Although fictional, The Peacemaker was based on the magazine article “One Point Safe” by Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn, a factual investigative news report about nuclear weapons smuggling in Russia.

Lethal Weapon 2 reteams Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as, respectively, “loose cannon” LA detective Martin Riggs and Riggs’ partner, the cautious family man Roger Murtaugh. The villain this time is a South African diplomat (Joss Ackland) who doubles as a drug dealer. Though Riggs knows what’s going on thanks to characterless character witness Joe Pesci, he can’t touch the villain because of “diplomatic immunity.” After perils too numerous to mention, Riggs and Murtaugh shoot it out with the heavies on the deck of a South African cargo ship. Lethal Weapon 2, of course, contains as one of its comic high-points a now famous suspense scene: Mel Gibson agonizingly attempting to extricate a terrified Danny Glover from a booby-trapped toilet seat. Gibson, Glover, Donner and Joe Pesci would be reunited three years later for Lethal Weapon 3 and in 1998 for Lethal Weapon 4.