There’s something about G20 that reminds me of a good old-fashioned 90s popcorn action-flick. The substance is shallow, the characters are either cartoonishly noble or crazy-eyed bad, and the situations they all get themselves into border on incredible (as in not even credible). Without star power, these types of films are usually dully cheesy. But when you cast Viola Davis as the U.S. President with the skills of a soldier, G20 becomes both cheesy and awesome at the same time.
Viola, in full badass form (it seems she has kept up her Woman King training), plays President Danielle Sutton, a military veteran who used her unexpected fame (she was photographed in a war zone carrying a wounded child) for the power of good, eventually becoming President of the United States. G20 wastes no time getting the President and her entire family, including husband Derek (Anthony Anderson), and teens Serena (Marsai Martin) and Demetrius (Christopher Farrar) to the G20 economic summit in South Africa, where the 20 world leaders of the top 20 economic countries are convening at a super-secure remote hotel. The problem is that someone in the Cabinet hired sketchy private security in addition to the usual Secret Service, so you just know that something is going to go awry very quickly.
A cackling madman name Rutledge (Anthony Starr) turns out to be the bad guy in the guns-for-hire squad that uses his soldiers to quickly incapacitate the guards and take all the world leaders and their spouses hostage in the ballroom. Rutledge has kind of a valid beef with the world—something about rich countries hoarding wealth while others suffer—but it’s negated by the fact that he’s fleecing the rich countries to fill his “cyberwallet” (a physical cellphone-sized device) with cryptocurrency, making him… some sort of Marvel villain?
Anyway, President Sutton is having none of it. Using her military stealth and moxie, she and a handful of others, including the amusingly wimpy Prime Minister of the UK, evade initial capture. Sutton, being the badass that she is, knows that she and the others need to get to safety in order to help the rest… but it all becomes a huge explosive mess when her own husband and kids become targets. It’s up to Viola, I mean Sutton, to tear off the bottom half of her red silk dress, grab a big effing gun, and get down to business.
G20 gets off to a kind slow, eyeball-rolling start. The hotel looks super-AI-generated, and some of the technology is amusingly and weirdly unimpressive (including perhaps the most laughingly slow facial-recognition software I’ve ever seen in a movie). This is the type of movie where everything can be sabotaged by the technology in the wrist ID that they all wear, but at the same time, a teenager can crawl up an antennae and disrupt the whole scheme by unplugging a couple cords.
But G20, once it kicks into gear, turns out to be a lot of fun… and that’s in huge part due to the cast. Ramón Rodríguez plays Manny, Sutton’s right-hand Secret Service agent, a strong, sensitive, sexy guard always at her side. Anthony Starr’s bad guy first comes across as a third-rate Hemsworth, but then he gets in his groove. Even minor characters like the hotel maître d’ and concierge, who turn out to be secretly planted South African agents, get a killer scene obliterating bad guys by the hotel pool. These two are so effortlessly cool while being smokin’ hot that they deserve their own movie (wish I could figure out who they were!).
When G20 was in production last year, I’m sure the filmmakers imagined a different type U.S. leadership than the situation we’re in now (seriously, who could have imagined the current government?). Perhaps because the daily news is such a horror, there is something extra pleasing, extra escapist about this movie. We’d like to imagine ourselves having a badass President. We’d like to remember a world where other countries looked at the U.S. to save the day. If I were to choose a fantasy President, heck yes, Viola Davis would have my vote!
