G20
A heroic US president and a buffoonish British prime minister are targeted by terrorists.
The woman king: Viola Davis (with Douglas Hodge and MeeWha Alana Lee)
Image courtesy of Amazon Media.
The premise is terrifying, the execution as efficient as in any Gerard Butler potboiler and the conclusion is, well, absurd. But Viola Davis is in charge, both as star and producer, so it’s not all bad. She plays Danielle Sutton, the current US president and former war hero, the sort of woman the Democratic elite would love to have in the White House, a Michelle Obama fantasy figure. But this is the real world, the dollar is in freefall, cryptocurrency has made an unexpected gain and hostile forces are finding it ever easier to infiltrate government firewalls.
This particular G20 summit is taking place in Cape Town, South Africa, and Danielle Sutton is the star attraction. But the President has other issues to deal with first, although the film slips in a red herring at the outset. The action begins in a Budapest church where a meeting between two shady characters offers us references to ‘crypto wallets,’ ‘bitcoin’ and ‘blockchain,’ setting the scene for a very modern thriller. There is a kerfuffle, the woman with the crypto wallet in her possession dashes out of the church and is immediately followed by three gun-toting goons. Intercut with this commotion is a caption that reads Washington D.C. and a woman is woken up in the middle of the night by her private security agent. “Madam President,” he whispers loudly, “we have a situation.” Then, as Viola Davis marches through the corridors of power in her jimjams, the film cuts back to Budapest where Crypto Wallet Woman is jumping through windows as brittle as ice. Back in Washington, the “situation” proves to be Code Name Avid, a domestic issue involving Danielle’s 17-year-old daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) playing truant.
And so we first see Viola’s Warrior Queen as Mother who, as one snipey journalist points out later, can’t be much of a president if she can’t keep her own house in order. Serena, unhelpfully, snaps at her significant parent: “all you ever do is try to make yourself look good.” It’s tough being a mother, but it’s even harder being a world leader and when Danielle feels impelled to drag her two kids along to the South African summit to keep her beady eye on them, one can feel the pages of the script fall into one’s lap.
Much of what follows is actually extremely disquieting, particularly with much of Spain and Portugal recently experiencing nation-wide power outages and here a gang of very greedy, cold-blooded fanatics break through the air-tight security of the summit to switch the pass-key codes and mess with the technology to their own advantage. Then, before you can say “Yippee-ki-yea”, eighteen world leaders are taken hostage, with the Australian PM being the first to take a bullet to the head. Only the US president and the British prime minister manage to escape the terrorists, the latter (Douglas Hodge) portrayed as a Churchill-loving clown. The president herself, of course, takes on all comers and can grapple a thug twice her size to the ground.
If it weren’t all so ridiculous, this would be highly distressing stuff, dealing with the frailty of the world economy, the dangers of AI and the legerdemain of deepfake expertise “in a world in which disinformation is more powerful than information.” G20, the movie, really tries to have its cake and eat it, slipping in the odd comic one-liner (Danielle’s son, admiring a South African security agent’s fighting skill with: “Holy shit, you’re from Wakanda!” to Serena’s observation: “Look, there’s a door – maybe we can get out this way.” The film’s four scriptwriters are obviously getting in each other’s way, not sure whether to produce a modern-day Die Hard or a hard-hitting commentary on the hazards of bitcoin and motherhood. It sort of muddles along in an absurdly entertaining way, if you are willing to overlook what you have already seen a hundred times before. And Viola Davis really can kick ass with the best of them.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Viola Davis, Anthony Anderson, Marsai Martin, Ramón Rodríguez, Douglas Hodge, Elizabeth Marvel, Sabrina Impacciatore, Clark Gregg, Antony Starr, Christopher Farrar, John Hoogenakker, Ali Suliman, Angela Sarafyan, MeeWha Alana Lee, Gideon Emery, Joseph Steven Yang.
Dir Patricia Riggen, Pro Andrew Lazar, Viola Davis and Julius Tennon, Screenplay Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller, Ph Checco Varese, Pro Des Sebastian Krawinkel and Nigel Phelps, Ed Emma E. Hickox and Doc Crotzer, Music Joseph Trapanese, Costumes Paco Delgado and Moira Meyer, Sound David Esparza, Dialect coach Adrian Galley.
MRC/Mad Chance/JuVee-Amazon Media.
107 mins. USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 10 April 2025. Cert. 15.
