There has been somewhat of a niche of political action movies where the president and/or political leaders are taken hostage and have to be saved by the Secret Service or someone like that. Think of the Olympus Has Fallen movies or White House Down and others of that nature. G20 is a return to form, pitting Viola Davis as President Sutton against a group of terrorists led by Corporal Rutledge, played by the sinister Antony Starr at the G20 summit in Cape Town Africa. As the other leaders are held hostage and world economies crumble, President Sutton has to save not just herself but her family as well.
G20 doesn’t do much to stand apart from the crowd in all honesty. It has a stacked cast, with the legend herself Viola Davis as our commander-in-chief, Anthony Anderson as her first gentleman, and Antony Starr as the lead terrorist, out to crumble global economies and bolster his own pockets. The cast all does a good job playing their part and made this an enjoyable watch, albeit one that is ultimately unremarkable..
My main issue with the movie came down to the story itself and the lack of depth given to the main characters. AI deepfakes and cryptocurrency play a major role in the story and are driving motivations for Rutledge. His plan involves recording each member of the summit saying a pangram and using deepfake technology to spread disinformation about their economic plans, causing each of their fiat currencies to crater while unregulated currencies, i.e. crypto, soar. The movie has painfully on-the-nose lines about how disinformation is more powerful than information which do wonders to take you out of a movie. The deepfakes created to crash the markets are laughably unbelievable but for plot purposes, they work. Although, if the real world has taught us anything, people will believe a lot of what they see online. There are elements of this that it feels like the movie didn’t fully understand but still included, like the opening chase seen over a crypto wallet that could have been verified virtually.
President Sutton and Rutledge are two sides of the same coin. They both were deployed in the army and both served on the same mission. When all hell broke loose, Sutton gained notoriety by saving a child from debris with the photo becoming not just the cover of Time Magazine but also her successful presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Rutledge was ahead of her, but he lost two of his “best mates” in the combat. In his mind, he lost too much in a war he was fighting on behalf of the rich, and his mission at the summit is his way of evening the score. In their (brief) interactions, she refers to him as the “soldier who never left” while she was able to come home. This refers to how he is still emotionally/mentally stuck in the war while she was able to put it in her past, learn, and grow from her experiences. This is a dynamic that should have been explored more, and I personally think the movie should have featured more scenes of Davis and Starr together to achieve this. I get that these movies all operate the same with the president hiding from the villain until the very end when they have their first encounter, but this dynamic should have been explored more.
The action is exciting for the most part. Antony Starr gets to do more hand-to-hand combat than he’s gotten with The Boys and Viola Davis and Ramon Rodriguez kick a ton of foreign ass. Viola Davis’s biceps alone should be enough reason to give this a watch. The fight choreography is hit or miss but leans more on being fine.
FINAL THOUGHTS
G20 doesn’t reinvent the wheel or elevate a recycled story. It relies heavily on tropes and cliches, and the dialogue and premise at times are enjoyable. But at the end of the day, Viola Davis and Antony Starr will make any movie more watchable and I did enjoy their screentime. G20 isn’t the best movie of the year, but it isn’t the worst.
2.5/5
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I've always been a movie fan, but I first got big into cinema watching Whiplash when I was younger. That movie led to a greater appreciation of films and got me to dive into the medium. My favorite genre is horror movies, but I’ll always have a secret soft spot for rom coms and musicals. When I'm not podcasting or watching movies, I love working out and going hiking, and I currently work in business analytics with the degree I got from Western New England University.
MY FAVORITE MOVIES: Good Will Hunting, Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse, Whiplash, Moneyball, Top Gun: Maverick