Viola Davis' Action President Can't Rescue the Woeful G20

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In G20, every world leader attending the titular diplomatic summit is held hostage by jaded, ex-special forces terrorists, with only the leader of the free world able to stop them. It’s a film molded by its forefathers Air Force One, White House Down, or the Bill Pullman bits of Independence Day, which all try to balance the glee of casting a Hollywood A-lister as the President of the United States with robust if implausible action mechanics. Wolfgang Petersen and Roland Emmerich may not be the finest composers of small or large-scale action, but they have demonstrated enough of an understanding of scale, pacing, and geography to justify the high concept – the President has a gun, and needs to protect our freedom in a very literal way. G20, on the other hand, is a generic, ugly, and poorly composed piece of Grade A streaming slop, and makes us want to give the likes of Petersen and Emmerich the Medal of Freedom.

Before we get to its many faults, it’s worth noting G20 gets one part of its concept correct: casting Viola Davis as the President. Getting the vibes right when casting your President is the most important first step when making a film in this subgenre – the audience should lock eyes on an acclaimed, charismatic actor wearing the Presidential pin or standing in the Oval Office and think, “Yeah, I buy that.” Davis, one of three Black women to win the EGOT, has made a career of playing women with rich emotional ranges in impossible situations, and her decades of dependable, often exemplary work has gained her reputation as one of the most talented actors working today. Casting her as a fictional President makes so much sense it borders on unimaginative.

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“Unimaginative” is the optimal word for G20, even if “sense” isn’t. Despite her star’s enthusiasm to broaden her genre horizons, director Patricia Riggen has made an utterly incompetent thriller. Thanks to the efforts of four different writers (we can infer from the three rows of on-screen writing credits that Noah Miller and Logan Miller wrote the original draft, and Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss reworked it), G20 falls victim to the most turgid action trends while attempting to approach modern geopolitical issues with jaw-dropping cluelessness.

President Danielle Sutton (Davis) became a national hero when Time snapped a picture of her carrying an Iraqi child to safety during the Battle of Fallujah. Now, she’s days away from proposing a solution to world hunger at the G20 summit in Cape Town when her rebellious teenage daughter Serena (Marsai Martin), who’s also proficient in hacking, breaches security to go on an unsanctioned night out without her security detail. This is the type of stress President Sutton doesn’t need, as she’s facing stiff opposition to her world hunger proposal – introducing a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency to impoverished African farming communities to help them get a leg up on the economic stage.

This is probably the most insane thing a President has proposed doing in a film that wasn’t overtly dystopian or a comedy. Cryptocurrencies are notoriously unstable, and their growth has a direct boost on the tech sector, an industry that depends on the resource stripping, labor exploitation and impoverishment of developing nations in order to accumulate wealth. There is no solving world hunger without dismantling the powers of the tech sector – a number of tech billionaires (like, for example, Jeff Bezos, whose corporation bankrolled G20) could theoretically “end” world hunger on a simple cost front, but the concept of “world hunger” is itself a product of capitalist imperialism, the type of which the President of the United States by definition favors.

Although it’s now perhaps no shock for a U.S. President to push geopolitical solutions that line the pockets of Big Tech, the fact that no-one raises any of the above critiques during G20 is maddening and distracting. Our villain Rutledge (Anthony Starr) hijacks the summit with deep fake tech and a grudge against the American empire, but he only critiques the crypto plan for being a way to prop up the American dollar. He himself loves crypto, and wants to steal a great deal of it, and never shows the self-awareness that becoming ridiculously wealthy is just not worth using lethal force against multiple world leaders.

G20 does not look or move like a film that knows it’s an action film. Instead, it feels like all of the 4K footage learned of their specific genre expectations when they were gathered together on an editing timeline, and then scrambled to resemble one in post. Save for a few welcome wide shots, it’s difficult to make out the choreography thanks to dizzying shakycam and overcutting, and the CG muck that’s used for entire exterior sets is an unconvincing backdrop for the prestigious setting. It’s crushing watching this many capable actors – not just Davis and Starr, but Elizabeth Marvel, Douglas Hodge, Ramón Rodríguez, and Sabrina Impacciatore – throw their weight behind cardboard caricatures, whether it’s for faux-badass heel turns or airless comedy punctuating the action.

But at a certain point during G20’s 108 minutes, the dismal quality stops being offensive (but still a chore to get through). You realize that the baffling politics, lousy direction, and insufficient action was never the point of the film – it’s a film designed to sit at the head of the Prime Video “most watched” chart for a couple of weeks, proudly wearing its “New Original Movie” badge with pride as it attracts only the least committed of viewers. It’s a galling truth, but if Amazon has truly devalued their products, their talent, and their distribution this badly, then even abysmal art like G20 can be shrugged off with no effort. Is it even worth going to the effort of impeachment?

Director: Patricia Riggen
Writer: Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Logan Miller, Noah Miller
Stars: Viola Davis, Anthony Anderson, Marsai Martin, Ramón Rodríguez, Antony Starr, Douglas Hodge, Elizabeth Marvel, Sabrina Impacciatore, Clark Gregg
Release date: April 10, 2025

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

Viola Davis’ Action President Can’t Rescue the Woeful G20