The Peace Killers

There’s a moment in The Peace Killers when the commune’s spiritual guru, Alex, is strapped to a giant peace symbol and crucified by the biker gang terrorizing his flock. It’s the film’s most indelible image. It’s also a metaphor that swings at you like a two-by-four.

The setup has potential. Kristen and her brother Jeff are commune members who chance upon a biker gang led by Reb, Kristen’s ex. Reb wants her back. She doesn’t want to go back. What follows is essentially a feature-length game of keep-away played under an enormous blue sky, through creek beds and canyons and red clay gullies. Director Douglas Schwartz knows his locations and uses them.

Clint Ritchie, top-billed and earning it, plays Reb as a man who goes from quiet to volcanic in the space of a sentence, and always seems to be calculating something behind the rage. You believe immediately what he’s capable of. Believe it, and dread it.

The trouble is everyone else in the script.

Alex, the commune’s guru, believes he can talk to the bikers because deep down, everyone wants to be peaceful. The bikers do not want to be peaceful. They beat commune members. They assault women. They crucify Alex on his own symbol. And when Kristen returns with a rival gang to end it—when the film has assembled all the pieces for a proper revenge finale—Alex still insists on negotiation. Out of ideas, the movie blinks.

Compare this to Straw Dogs, released the same year. Dustin Hoffman’s pacifist also insists on talking. But Peckinpah understands something director Schwartz doesn’t: Hoffman’s character isn’t trying to convince anyone. He’s trying to convince himself. The strain shows. It accumulates. When he finally breaks, it means something. Alex never accumulates anything. His shock at the end reads less like a man undone by violence than a man surprised anyone would dare.

That’s not a character arc. That’s a cartoon wearing a peace medallion.

The film pads its 88 minutes with elaborate contrivances to keep Kristen in peril. She bolts from hiding. She lingers when she shouldn’t. At one point Alex yanks Reb off her, throws him to the ground, and immediately turns his back. When characters behave this foolishly, you start rooting against them.

That said, The Peace Killers hints at what might have been. Moments of surprising violence, stark and bloody. It has Ritchie’s menace. It has that sky—characters dwarfed by open country in a way that Peckinpah’s enclosed nighttime siege never quite achieves. There’s a primal quality to it, men and women small under an indifferent Arizona sun.

It just needed a script that took its own ideas seriously.

Psycho-biker enthusiasts will find Ritchie’s performance worth the time. Everyone else should put on Straw Dogs instead. It’s better in all the ways that count.