Guns, guns, guns this is America
dir: Patricia Riggen
2025
In the immortal words of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, I (occasionally) love trash. I don’t love all trash, because even a grouch has to be picky sometimes, which means I am incapable of watching something like Married at First Sight without whacking myself in the face with a hammer.
But when it comes to movies, especially towards the end of the week, and especially when I’ve been drinking (which only happens at the end of the week), I don’t always feel like a 3 ½ epic about a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust trying to build buildings in America and dodge the rapist tendencies of a billionaire played by Guy Pearce, or a long slow film about a depressed textile worker in a 17th century factory who finds relief in pricking herself with needles as an important and entirely valid commentary on social inequity and the benefits and drawbacks of alternative medicines.
No. Sometimes I just want to watch Viola Davis fuck people up.
Sure, there’s plenty of movies available where people come to a violent end at the hands of a righteous avenger, but then I heard that a new flick was coming out with Davis as the lead playing an American President pretty much in a Die Hard scenario, saving the day, making quips, giving the baddies what for.
On that count, on paper, I cannot say that this flick doesn’t deliver on exactly those counts. Viola Davis does play the American president at the annual G20 conference, where all the biggest and hottest economies getting together to figure out how they’re going to fuck over the rest of the world, this time in Cape Town South Africa.
She was formerly in the army, so her ability and willingness to kill people is backed up by story detail. It is also, since she’s referred to as a war hero, her ticket to political success in an America that this film imagines isn’t dominated by racist and sexist morons who would rather vote for an adjudicated rapist and 36 count felon whose every business has failed except for the one propping up White Supremacy. In other words, this fantasy realm is nothing like our actual world.
She has two annoying kids and a husband with a beard so pointy that we never confuse him with some beta / handbag carrying wuss. Nah, he’s ALL man.
President Davis makes a speech saying the countries in the G20 are going to figure out a way to end global hunger, which is another example of how this is really a fantasy film, and not based on this, our plane of existence. The other members of the G20 are reluctant to get on board, but that’s only because they have no idea what’s about to happen to them.
An (I’m guessing) ex-SAS Australian guy called Rutledge (Antony Starr) leads a bunch of mercenaries who take over the estate where the G20 is being held, which means they take as hostages all the leaders of all those countries. Including, I might add, the Prime Minister of Australia. Sure, the presidents of Russian and China are there, but they have an actual guy who’s meant to be the head honcho for our home that is girt by sea.
The actor, who I don’t think gets a single line of dialogue before he’s unceremoniously murdered, is called Colin Moss. This will mean nothing to anyone outside of maybe 4 people, but he looks like the spitting image of Chris Minns, the current photogenic premier of New South Wales.
But I can say unequivocally that he looks 4000 times more attractive that any male prime minister this racist country has ever had. I mean, Albo has his charms, but Morrison? Abbot? Rudd? Howard and his Menzies-like eyebrows? Fraser? Menzies and his terrifying Howard-like eyebrows? These men’s faces have done more to convince Australian women to be gay than all of the Bunningses and flat soled comfortable shoes in all of Christendom.
I guess it doesn’t matter: his very attractive head attracts a bullet from the main nasty chap’s gun in short order, and then he’s not there for us to leer at any more.
As far as bad guys go, Antony Starr, who’s actually a Kiwi, has played some nasty ones, probably best known for playing the sociopathic “hero” Homelander in The Boys, convincingly and easily plays a (less psycho) mercenary type here, but, really, let’s be honest, he really is a stand-in for being that most terrible of things that exists in this the so-called real world: no, not a terrorist, or a vegan, but a crypto-bro. The entire scheme of taking all the leaders captive is for the purpose of influencing millions of people to take their money out of banks in order to buy cryptocurrencies.
I mean, morons are already doing that today without a single shootout or hostage, but he wants to accelerate the process and destroy the world order at the same time, leaving him as, I dunno, a somewhat more competent Elmo Husk.
I admit, it’s a dumb plan, so fucking dumb. But these kinds of things don’t matter. We understand the set up: hero under siege sneaks around against many enemies offing them in dribs and drabs, occasionally bumps into the hot Alan Rickman-like leader until finally making sure they bite the big one in a very brutal and / or cinematic fashion.
The only question is whether we buy Viola Davis as a John McLean type. The thing is, I guess we have to, we don’t really have a choice. She is so forceful, she demands that we take her seriously even and especially when everything around her seems so flimsy.
I could have done without the stuff with her family. She thinks her teenage daughter hates her because of the constricted life she’s meant to live as a result of being a president’s daughter. Madame President, I can assure you that she hates you because she’s your teenage daughter. And, because this is the bland kind of film that you’re in, she’ll come good, help you in crucial moments, and then tell you she loves you before the movie ends.
The action… is not so great in this flick. There are some decent enough brawls, a few one-on-one fights with some guys in combat gear where it goes okay, and one sequence of what I’m going to call “lazy John Wick type bullshit”, but it’s okay. Davis acquitted herself superbly in a very violent film a couple of years ago called The Woman King where she killed so many people with swords and her bare hands and sometimes just with a mean glare, but here it’s not really on the same level, though of course it’s a different context. This plays out exactly as you would expect a flick like this to play out, with almost nil surprises, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless.
It’s not a problem, specifically, but for much of the flick the president is saddled with the British prime minister, who’s a snivelling weasel until he isn’t, the South Korean prime minister’s wife, and the woman who is the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who’s great. I think I recognised her from the second season of White Lotus. Sabrina Impacciatore is her name, and she’s has all the ovaries the British PM lacks.
They all get their moments, but what it doesn’t foster is the feeling we had in the best flicks in this genre (the Die Hard genre: Die Hard in a building, Die Hard on a plane, on a train, on a boat, on a space station, in the White House, Die Hard with a president on the president’s plane, so many more) of the hero, alone, with some allies far away, battling against a group of cool killers who completely underestimate the hero until he or she kills them dead.
Here, there are so many obstacles of hangers-on and family thrown in her way that it all ends up looking like excuses for delaying the inevitable, which I guess all films have but it really feels like they wanted to be neither too much drama nor too much action, and they compensate by having Davis yell at people in a focused manner that could drill through concrete.
She is still pretty great, but this feels a bit like a victory lap, like yes she deserves her flowers but not necessarily for this flick. She has also clearly been working on those arms because, ye gods, I was having some flashbacks to Linda Hamilton / Sarah Conner in Terminator 2, which is the pinnacle of arms, or at least non-steroid abuse arms.
Her arms are great, she is great, but the film is middling both in concept and in delivery, but that’s okay. For a Friday night watch after a few ciders, well, I was in the right frame of mind for this flick. And I loved when the two South African secret services officers made their presence known and committed some acts of badassery, prompting the president’s other kid to yell “You’re from Wakanda!”, which made me laugh.
I do have to say as well, or at least I want to say that film titles are either getting more prosaic or dumber, take your pick. Maybe the algorithm is selecting these titles, maybe executives are getting more cowardly, but titles used to have a tiny bit of abstraction to them, like, they weren’t always solely about the thing they were about. Even the name Die Hard was a reference to what a badass the main character is, not about the predicament he found himself in, in which he might die in a hard or horrible fashion. G20 is a thing, but obviously not what this film is about. Not a second is spent adjudicating whether the G20 is a force for good, evil or mediocrity in the world.
At the very least it has to be better than the world these despicable crypto-bros imagine.
6 times “gee, 20?” is meant to be the answer to the question “how many margaritas did you have yesterday?” out of 10
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“It’s time we solve a crisis, the worst we’ve seen in decades.” – maybe Viola Davis’s magnificent arms can do something about the current fuckhead in the White House - G20
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