G20 is a sub-Prime Try Hard with a vengeance.
One can only imagine G20 was originally commissioned and written in an America where there was a lingering delusion that Kamala Harris would emerge victorious in the 2024 presidential election. Certainly it’s hard to imagine this idea even getting off the drawing board in the current reality although I for one would love to have seen a version of this film where our protagonist is a sociopathic and possibly syphilitic septuagenarian man-baby whose combat capabilities top out at throwing an all-caps hissy fit on Truth Social.
When a G20 summit in South Africa is hijacked by a terrorist group, the world leaders are taken hostage, except for the US President (Viola Davis), the British Prime Minister (Douglas Hodge, The Great), the head of the IMF – sadly not the Impossible Mission Force – (Sabrina Impacciatore, who you’ll likely recognise from The White Lotus, Season 2) and the South Korean First Lady (MeeWha Alana Lee). With this ragtag band running rogue, things aren’t going to plan for mercenary leader Edward Rutledge (Anthony Starr) and his scheme to transform the global economic system – if that even is his objective…
Viola Davis – never one to phone it in, even when the script seems to have misdialled – leans hard into the gravitas and grit of a former soldier reluctantly propelled to the Presidency and handles the action beats well too, holding her own against her cinematic presidential predecessors such as Marshall, Whitmore, Asher, Sawyer or Moore. Likewise, Starr is perfectly serviceable as the villainous leader of the terrorist organisation that’s branded onscreen but never in dialogue as “Awake”, essaying a more careworn menace than the high-strung edge-of-the-abyss energy of his Homelander but once you look beyond the two lead performances, things start to get a bit patchier.
It’s not really the cast’s fault though, because G20 is basic bitch movie writing, awash with risible dialogue and rooted in the geopolitical and macroeconomic understanding of the average “verified” X user. G20 is exactly what you would get if you asked ChatGPT to rewrite Die Hard. Instead of bearer bonds, we have an archly edgy crypto scam and instead of Hans Gruber and pals we have Rutledge’s “Awake Mob” laying waste to the world’s currency and equity markets – which in this fictional universe, the US President is against.
There’s an entertaining absurdity to how G20 blends hostage rescue with foreign policy fanfiction. The disposable, interchangeable villains are painted with all the nuance of a Cold War-era Bond movie, while the good guys range between bumbling comic relief and borderline racist stereotyping but Davis plays it straight, turning the potentially preposterous premise into something almost credible – or at least entertaining enough to carry off its self-importance.
Where G20 flags is in its attempts to retrofit an action thriller around its poorly articulated talking points. There’s a constant tension between action and articulating just what’s at stake, as if every time the writers tried to lean into explaining exactly what the various factions’ plans are they zoned out so eventually they stopped trying and just strung together a bunch of action movie cliches until they’d reached the required runtime.
Nowhere near good enough to be great, not bad enough to be so-bad-its-good, G20 lands – as all big international summits usually do – somewhere in the compromised, unsatisfying middle ground. A naïve geopolitical fantasy and low-brow high-concept action with just enough sincerity and star power to avoid collapsing under its own weight. It may not say anything revelatory about global governance, but it makes a decent case for the idea that maybe, just maybe, we should be looking to leaders who aren’t in it just to watch the world burn.
