G20 is a fairy tale from another era, employing every trick in the 1990s action playbook while imagining a Black female President who unites the world and saves her family through valiant a**-kicking.
Its hero played with staunch resolve and humanity by Viola Davis, she’s the Mamala of all Mamalas, and Patricia Riggen’s Prime Video film, which is now streaming, puts her through the preposterous wringer, having her fend off greedy terrorists, put up with annoying allies, and protect her husband, children, and comrades from danger.
Part Die Hard, part wish-fulfillment saga for a post-2024 present that didn’t come to pass, it’s a fantasy of feminist and U.S. might that’s chockablock with implausibilities—none more egregious than the fact that its villain crashes the global markets for personal gain and he’s not America’s commander-in-chief.
Danielle Sutton (Davis) landed in the White House thanks to army service in Fallujah that was lionized by a Time magazine cover photo of her saving a child from a destroyed building. Her campaign rival-turned-Treasury Secretary Joanna (Elizabeth Marvel) once called her a “warmonger” and she’s later chastised as a “bulldozer,” but despite this apparent slander, her gung-ho bona fides are soon to come in handy.
Before she can show off her murderous stuff, however, she first must deal with teenage daughter Serena (Marsai Martin), who’s created a scandal by sneaking out of the White House—by hacking an RFID system—and doing shots at a Georgetown bar. This makes Danielle appear to be weak on security, and after being grounded, Serena sneers at her mom, “All you ever try to do is make yourself look good.”
Davis’ POTUS is so obviously noble and kindhearted that these insults fail to dent her armor, and she’s soon traveling to Cape Town for the G20 summit, where she intends to introduce a plan for a new digital currency that will help ease a hunger crisis. She’s accompanied by her loyal husband Derek (Anthony Anderson) and greeted cooly by her compatriots, including British Prime Minister Oliver Everett (Douglas Hodge) and IMF bigwig Elena Romano (Sabrina Impacciatore).
Things hit the fan when Rutledge (Antony Starr), the head of the private security firm hired to help safeguard the President, seizes control of the “impenetrable” hotel venue. In the immediate chaos, Danielle escapes the ballroom with Elena, South Korea’s First Lady, and her right-hand Secret Service agent Manny Ruize (Will Trent’s Ramón Rodriguez), and Derek protects Serena and her brother Demetrius (Christopher Farrar) in an upstairs hotel room.
Rutledge blabs on and on about America starting wars and exploiting other countries’ natural resources but it’s all just a smokescreen for his desire to send the world’s markets into free fall and to convince people to invest in crypto—a plot that will make him and his anonymous henchmen wealthy.
To facilitate this, he forces the G20 attendees to spout gibberish at a camera so he can create misleading deep fake videos. Yet the person he really needs to make this ruse work is Danielle, and she’s busy sneaking around kitchens, sliding down laundry chutes, and leaping into elevators to kill burly and heavily armed adversaries. This requires cutting her long red gown short and ditching her high heels for sneakers, because she’s no fancy pants; rather, she’s Kamala Harris via John McClaine, John-Wick, Rambo, and Harrison Ford’s Air Force One leader.
Davis is a convincing warrior-politician in G20, and as he’s proven on The Boys, Starr has a knack for grinning maliciousness. Both go through insanely familiar paces courtesy of the script by Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Logan Miller, and Noah Miller, all as Serena—who, remember, is a sly tech genius—tries to access the roof’s satellite dish so she can create a secret connection to Washington to let the Vice President (Clark Gregg) know what’s going down.
The ensuing rescue mission by outside forces is stymied by the media’s decision to announce said operation to everyone (including Rutledge), but then, expecting anything less than abject nonsense from Riggen’s film is a recipe for disappointment. It’s better to simply accept the absurdity and go with the laughable flow.
During her ordeal, Danielle kills a bunch of dudes, convinces scaredy-cat Oliver that her strength is actually awesome (he even likens her to Winston Churchill!), and does so many daringly murderous things that grouchy teen Serena ultimately has to admit, “She’s kind of a bada**, huh?” before confessing, “Mom, you are really something special.”
That she is, at least as far as G20 is concerned. Director Riggen handles her shootouts and hand-to-hand combat with dutiful efficiency, having her protagonist slay various baddies in ways that keep on-screen bloodshed to a minimum. RPG fire, explosions, flipping cars, and other genre hallmarks embellish the material, and at a late stage, Danielle is aided by two undercover South African agents who are so formidable that Demetrius exclaims, “You’re from Wakanda!”
G20 offers a progressive 21st-century spin on a tried-and-true template, with Black women tasked with primary superhero duties (Anderson’s First Gentleman is, predictably, the material’s damsel in distress). Yet that’s just window dressing for a decidedly old-school venture in which meaningful personal and political change is affected via a knife and gun.
Routinely goofy, the film gets the job done on its own extremely limited terms, although it’s difficult to ignore the fact that, arriving at this particular moment in time, its conception of geopolitical good and evil doesn’t comport with reality—a notion that neuters some of its pleasures.
“When you have the actions of a tyrant, no one’s gonna hear your voice,” says Danielle to Rutledge, and while that’s a nice idea, it rings hollow in the age of Trump 2.0. G20 is, in a certain sense, nothing more than a formulaic throwback about using power for the betterment of mankind.
Unfortunately, it’s hampered by real-life events that are out of its control. Debuting in the midst of tremendous domestic upheaval in which America seems to be rewriting its values and reconfiguring its relationship to the world, the film—proffering a vision of courageous and selfless U.S. leadership that brings people and nations together—comes across as regrettably out of touch.
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