Viola Davis plays the President of the United States in G20 (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), which is smack in her wheelhouse. I know, I can read your thoughts: EVERYTHING is in Viola Davis’ wheelhouse. But in this case, she’s a honest-to-gum kickass President of the United States – as in, she’s got a bit of a Chuck Norris streak that’ll come in handy should anything ludicrous and/or implausible happen. And it does! Because who wants to watch a movie about a President flexing their muscles of diplomacy when you could be watching a movie about a President who knows her way around machine guns and grenades and the human body’s pressure points? I think she might have our vote, but let’s wait until we get to the end of this review to see if we’re up for an endorsement or not.
The Gist: Sensible shoes. All Prez Danielle Sutton (Davis) wants is comfortable footwear to go with the blazing-red dress she’s wearing to the G20 summit in South Africa. She’d also like a less rebellious teenage daughter, but one of these problems is far easier to solve than the other. It’s the eve of her departure for the conference, where the world’s 20 most powerful leaders will gather for this, that and/or the other thing – Sutton’s pushing a program that’ll put more food into hungry mouthsy by giving Sub-Saharan African farmers access to cryptocurrency or something, which, hey, wow, neat! And 17-year-old Serena (Marsai Martin) just got busted doing shots at a bar after she sneaked by Secret Service using, one presumes, a lethal combination of parkour, feng shui, haiku and screenwriterly contrivance. Which means the whole family, including First Gentleman Derek Sutton (Anthony Anderson) and Serena’s younger brother Demetrious (Christopher Farrar), will be taking the schlep to Cape Town, since certain people around here can’t be trusted to avoid mid-size scandals.
How Danielle got here is quite the story. Via expository dialogue that’s far cheaper than, say, a flashback, we learn that she’s an Army vet and war hero who had fame thrust upon her after she was photographed rescuing a child from a bombed-out building, and ended up on the cover of Time magazine. Which, remember when that was a relevant thing? And to answer your question, no, this movie isn’t set in the ’90s, but it sure plays like it was made during that decade. Derek was the medic who stitched her up and, yada yada yada, now she’s the whole damn President of the United States. Her knee is all scarred up from her time in service, but that doesn’t stop her from sparring with her top-shelf shadow security guard Manny Ruiz (Ramon Rodriguez), an ex-Marine who she pins with a coupla healthy jiu jitsu maneuvers. She tough!
How tough, exactly? We’re about to find out, hee hee hee. All the very important shieks and presidents and prime ministers mingle at a G20 cocktail party when whammo, a whole chunk of the hotel goos kaflooey. It seems the Secret Service made a bad decision, hiring a private security firm for added support, specifically, a private security firm led by a smug gum-chonker with facial scars, Rutledge (Antony Starr of The Boys), who we saw in the opening sequence getting his dirty mitts on a digital “crypto wallet,” which, yes, is very much a Movie Thingy That Everyone Will Chase, or Mr. MacGuffin if you’re into the whole brevity thing. The last thing anyone in a movie should do is trust a smug gum-chonker with facial scars, especially this one, who has a dastardly plan to take all the leaders hostage and sow chaos with AI-deepfake videos until the financial markets collapse, thus filling his crypto wallet with billions. Hint to Rutledge: Tariffs would’ve been far less violent.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Starr’s Hans Gruberisms and the navigating-the-bowels-of-a-building stuff is very Die Hard, crossed with the Prez-pushed-to-his-limitsness of silly flicks like White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen or Air Force One.
Performance Worth Watching: I’m torn between arguing that Davis is too good for this dopiness, and touting her as the perfect person to hard-sell it to us with a muscular blend of gravitas, earnestness and the slightest hint of an ironic wink.
Memorable Dialogue: Thank Clark Gregg for taking on the thankless task of reciting the dumbest slabs of exposition in the movie, e.g., “This is a coup! A global coup!” and “In a world where disinformation is more powerful than information, this will look very damning!” and “My god, it’s chaos out there!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Good thing the Prez ditched the high heels for sneakers, eh? In the opening moments when G20 drops a MADAME PRESIDENT WE HAVE A SITUATION bit and the SITUATION is Serena’s escape, it tells us not to take even a smidgen of this stuff seriously. The screenwriters are essentially bowling alley pin setters, establishing President Danielle Deadshot’s ability to whoop butt – and Serena’s fledgling hacker abilities, which emerge just in the nick of time – and then eventually getting to the part where she whoops a whole lotta butt, and you’ll note how it’s the girls who lead all the butt-whooping, so we get a hefty dose of lite-feminist U-go-grl action that’s big these days. You’ll also note that, in modern times, bowling-pin setters are automated machines, which is precisely the metaphor I’m going for in my criticism of this wildly cheesy and unapologetically formulaic screenplay.
The plot is little more than a bunch of questionable decisions by people who should know better, which works great to set up sequences in which President Viola Davis tears off the bottom hem off her gown, velcroes on a kevlar vest and goes to f—ing town, getting into close scrapes, including, but not at all limited to, climbing into elevator shafts, sniping a bunch of HGH-snorting beardos and dangling precariously from vertigo-inducing heights. The hubs and kids get guns pointed at them while the Prez, with loyal Manny by her side, rallies a handful of her political allies and rivals (the blustery British PM, a fiery Italian pol in spike heels, and a mild-mannered First Lady of South Korea are among of stereotypes) to escape the primary melee, gather their wits and “breach the perimeter” and suchlike. You can take the warrior president out of the war, but you’ll never take the war out of the warrior president.
So down the stretch we get an increasingly bonkers pileup of eyeroller scenes, the likes of which make one go UH HUH and reach for another fistful of greasy popcorn. The villain’s dastardly crypto scheme and finanical skullduggery might have a little relevance if Starr wasn’t such a sneering cartoon, but watering down any droplets of political content that might seep through the cracks is precisely what the movie wants to do, being a peabrained slab of middlebrow entertainment, directed with just enough craft and care to make it passable fodder for this weekend’s streaming-menu slate, which is to say, it’s not quite worth whipping out my well-worn argument that action movies like this deserve theatrical release. At least Roland Emmerich crapola like White House Down and 2012 – which absolutely suck, but are at least admirable in their willingness to Go There – justify being projected on the enormo-screen. Then again, Viola Davis is ferocious(ish) enough here to demand more respect than an ad-buffered Amazon stream provides.
Our Call: Is G20 perfectly acceptably entertaining trash? I dunno. It’s never boring, but neither is it every particularly good, and maybe Davis’ commitment to the bit pushes it to watchable status. So if you’re hard up you could STREAM IT and turn a few of those eyerolls into belly laughs.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.