G20 Movie Review: Viola Davis and Antony Starr can't save this boring Die Hard clone
Viola Davis stars as soldier-turned-president Danielle Sutton, who, while attending the G20 summit in Cape Town, South Africa, is attacked by a group of terrorists.
American presidents saving the day in action movies is not new ground for Hollywood. The leader of the free world taking on terrorists, aliens, and vampires in films like Independence Day, White House Down, Air Force One, and the more absurd Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has formed its own quirky action sub-genre.
So when I started watching Amazon's G20, directed by Patricia Riggen and starring Viola Davis as the President of the United States, I wondered whether it would be a dramatic thriller, an action-comedy, or a self-aware film that embraced its ridiculous premise. Sadly, G20 is none of these and instead turns out to be a boring and poorly executed disappointment.
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A wasted premise with a flimsy plot
Viola Davis stars as soldier-turned-president Danielle Sutton. While attending the G20 summit in Cape Town, South Africa, she is attacked by a group of terrorists led by rogue soldier Rutledge, played by Antony Starr. Surrounded and outgunned, Sutton must find a way to save her fellow delegates and take down the bad guys.
The first sin this movie commits is poking holes in its plot and highlighting how absurd the premise is. There’s a reason why movies like this rush through the technical details of the villain's "genius" plan, especially if they don’t have the writing to back it up. The more time spent explaining, the more time the audience has to realise it makes no sense.
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While the director and writers had an interesting idea, using cryptocurrency and deepfakes to sow chaos, the movie takes it too far. The villain plans to steal all the money in the world (not a joke) and use deep fakes to release cartoonishly evil videos of world leaders.
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Underdeveloped characters and missed opportunities
The second major misstep is the attempt to make us care about the family dynamic between Sutton and her teenage daughter, Serena, played by Marsai Martin. Their troubled relationship feels forced, and Serena is written as a one-note angsty teen, making the emotional angle fall flat.
Instead, the film could have focused on Sutton’s PTSD and survivor's guilt from her time in the army, elements that, while not well written, are at least partially redeemed by Davis’s strong performance in a handful of emotional scenes.
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A star-studded letdown
The greatest offence G20 commits is wasting the immense talent of Viola Davis in such a bland and uninspired action movie. With a lead like Davis, this could have been an intense thriller or even a fun, over-the-top action romp in the vein of Commando. But the film squanders the opportunity to do anything meaningful or memorable.
As for Antony Starr, all I can say is that the man tried with what little he was given, which might as well have been a napkin with “you are a bad guy, do bad guy things” written on it, followed by a winking emoji.
G20 feels like one of those B-grade films action stars reluctantly sign on to when their careers are fading. You can see the effort from the actors, but everything around them is a letdown, marking the beginning of their “so bad it’s good” phase of movies.
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