The line between punches and punchlines blurs in Heads of State.
Even at its most tense moments, a sense of goofy fun creeps into director Ilya Naishuller’s action thriller about a Hollywood star-turned US President and a UK Prime Minister who reluctantly team up after an assassination attempt.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Even big setpieces often veer into slapstick comedy. Take a high-speed car shootout through the streets of Trieste, in which President Will Derringer (John Cena) puts up a bloody fight…by hurling his backup blood bags at the hired killers’ windshields so as to obscure their view. Or a sequence in which a group of athleisure-clad Belarusian men start a fistfight with Will and the PM, Sam Clarke (Idris Elba).
Will and Sam don’t really pull off some of their best moves so much as they stumble into them by complete accident; a shot from inside one combatant’s mouth, framing both world leaders through the gap left by his knocked-out tooth, should tell you which side still has the upper hand though.
The film’s best action sequence, however, comes from its most unlikely character: a gawky, awestruck CIA station agent played by Jack Quaid in a Hawaiian shirt. Take a moment to picture it. When a group of assassins breaks into the safe house Will and Sam are hiding out at, the same guy who was, seconds earlier, bumping into tables and using Friends analogies to explain geopolitical tensions, swiftly adopts a cool confidence.
As the assassins storm upstairs, Marty Comer (Quaid) gets the traditional heroic suit-up scene, putting on his grenade-carrying vest and pair of sunglasses (nevermind that it’s nighttime and they’re indoors—he pulls it off!). When he says he’s going to get Will and Sam out of there, suddenly, you believe it.
Pausing to pop in a Beastie Boys CD first, he proceeds to not only boomerang the assassins’ explosives right back at them, but, tracking their movements on a massive monitor he’s cradling, he calmly moves down a hallway shooting most of them through the wall before they can figure out what’s going on. When Marty’s shot, his one last act of grinning defiance against death is to pull the pin off one of his grenades—too bad the assassins intercept it, then finish the job. At least Will and Sam escape.
What makes this sequence such an unexpected delight is that it plays into the image Quaid’s come to be associated with onscreen, only to then subvert it.
Consider the actor’s long-standing role on the superhero show The Boys, on which his utter lack of superpowers becomes a major sore spot for his timid, often helpless character in Season 3. He’s an unlikely hero in the recent action movie Novocaine too, his character introduced as a mild-mannered introvert. Naishuller, whose previous film Nobody revealed that even a middle-aged family man (Bob Odenkirk) could harbour a secret past as an assassin, upends expectations here too, making the revelation of Quaid’s action chops a gleeful surprise.
Even on a visual level, the men he’s tasked with protecting are far more muscular than he is, with Elba and Cena having firmly cemented their action hero credentials. Here, however, Cena’s Will, famous as “the Venom in denim” for his (pre-Presidential) starring role in the Water Cobra action franchise, finds that his onscreen “fighting” skills are useless in an actual brawl (who knew real life doesn’t have stunt doubles?).
Of what use is working with Keanu Reeves if you haven’t picked up any of his moves? And while Elba’s Sam is a former soldier, he’s now pretty rusty.
What a joy to see Marty reappear in the film’s post-credits scene, having survived the attack and using the story of his near-escape to (unsuccessfully) pick up women at a bar. Heads of State even teases a potential new adventure by having MI6 agent Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra-Jonas) approach him.
“There is no damn playbook,” says Marty when Will and Sam first show up at the safehouse, talking about the protocol for an unprecedented political scenario, but also, as it turns out, his wildcard nature. All the better, can we get that spinoff now?
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