Summary
Viola Davis makes a convincing action hero in this satisfyingly silly throwback, even if you’ve seen it all before.
From Harrison Ford yelling “Get off my plane!” in Air Force One to Harrison Ford yelling “Now I’m a wartime President!” in Captain America: Brave New World, cinema sure loves its Commandos in Chief. With G20, director Patricia Riggen straps a gun to Viola Davis and sends her charging down some very familiar corridors.
US President Danielle Sutton (Davis) is juggling family commitments with a new global economic initiative as she heads to the G20 Summit in South Africa. But just as proceedings begin, Australian terrorist Rutledge (Antony Starr) and his squad take the assembled world leaders hostage. With her security detail wiped out and her family’s lives on the line, former soldier Sutton is forced to take matters into her own hands.
You’ve seen this film before. Maybe not this exact one, but G20 occupies that space between Die Hard and White House Down and never aims for anything more. The first ten minutes do most of the heavy lifting, quickly establishing daughter Serena’s (Marsai Martin) rebellious streak and handy penchant for hacking, Sutton’s combat chops, and other details that all but scream: “you’ll see us later in the film.”
It’s a world not too far from our own—just one where a kick-ass Viola Davis is POTUS and the villains are Australian. Rutledge, though, is no Hans Gruber. Like the bearer bonds and electric grid sabotage in Die Hard, a grab bag of buzzwords—cryptocurrency, deep fakes, AI, disinformation—wafts past to give the illusion of timeliness. In every other respect, if you picked this up and plonked it down in 1988, it’d play like a blockbuster of the most reliable order.
Things get increasingly preposterous, especially once a gun-toting President leads a makeshift party—including the UK PM (Douglas Hodge), a Secret Service agent (Ramón Rodríguez), and a few assorted dignitaries—through some of the building’s most obvious hiding spots. Meanwhile, the B-plot featuring First Gentleman (Anthony Anderson) scrambling to protect the kids only pops up now and then, mostly to remind us there are stakes. You know, aside from the twenty most powerful leaders in the world being held at gunpoint.
Still, Davis makes it work. The whole film hangs on our belief in her, and our willingness to abandon reason everywhere else. After all, this is a movie where a helicopter fight happens entirely on the ground. G20 breaks no new ground—and doesn’t want to. If this counts as a successful term, we’d happily vote for a sequel where all bets are off.
2025 | USA | DIRECTOR: Patricia Riggen | WRITERS: Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Logan Miller, Noah Miller | CAST: Viola Davis, Anthony Anderson, Marsai Martin, Ramón Rodríguez, Douglas Hodge, Elizabeth Marvel, Sabrina Impacciatore, Clark Gregg, Antony Starr | DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios | RUNNING TIME: 108 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 10 April 2025
