G20 is not a DIE-HARD-on-a-______ movie – it’s an AIR-FORCE-ONE-in-a-hotel. Presidential offshoots of DIE HARD are pretty much a sub-subgenre now with WHITE HOUSE DOWN and OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN and this in the books. But this is the type where the president is ex-military and is the indisputable action lead, and the only one where she’s played by Academy Award winner Viola Davis. THE WOMAN KING showed us Davis could have moves, everything else showed us she has the gravitas to play a formidable world leader, and it’s fun to watch her do both of those things at the same time.

Though this went straight to the Amazon Product Supply Corporation’s television buffering service it’s one of the ones they do every once in a while where they advertise it as if hoping a bunch of people will know it exists. It has good production values, seems like a professionally made movie, could probly be released in theaters, but luckily it wasn’t because it is about exactly good enough to mildly enjoy while on your couch and almost completely forget before you can figure out how to get it to continue playing the credits instead of showing you a bunch of other shit that you don’t want to see. Not that you really need to experience the credits but you’re not a savage, you would leave them on if the fucking thing would let you.

Davis (LAW ABIDING CITIZEN) plays President Danielle Sutton, whose presidential ascent was assured when a photo of her rescuing a child in Afghanistan turned out so good it made the cover of Time. She may be seen as a war hero but she’s still getting pilloried by the press because her 17-year-old daughter Serena (Marsai Martin, AN AMERICAN GIRL STORY – MELODY 1963: LOVE HAS TO WIN) snuck out and was viral-videoed drinking at a club. This is the kind of thing you want to see in a cheesy one of these because you get to look forward to when the knowledge of electronics and RFID chips she used to slip the Secret Service comes in handy against terrorists.

Sutton brings the whole family with her to the G20 summit at a luxury hotel in Cape Town, South Africa. That’s Serena, younger son Demetrius (Christopher Farrar, Loquareeous from the “Three Slaps” episode of Atlanta), and First Gentleman Derek (Anthony Anderson, URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT). Whether or not the location is secure is kind of beside the point because the private security team are extremists planning to capture the world leaders and make deep fake videos of them talking about phony conspiracy stuff in order to crash economies and pull a crypto scam on the whole world. Their leader Rutledge is played by Antony Starr (GUY RITCHIE’S THE COVENANT, COBWEB), adding an Australian accent and gum-smacking arrogance to his trademark creepy eyes.

Sutton’s main goal at the conference is to win over the sexist asshole UK Prime Minister Oliver Everett (Douglas Hodge, THE DESCENT PART 2), so when the doors lock and the guns and smoke bombs come out during the group photo she takes him with her to safety. Those two plus First Lady of South Korea Han Min-Seo (MeeWha Alana Lee, UMMA), head of the IMF (the International Monetary Fund, not the Impossible Mission Force) Elena Romano (Sabrina Impacciatore, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST), and the president’s war buddy/sensei/head bodyguard Manny Ruiz (Ramón Rodríguez, CARLITO’S WAY: RISE TO POWER) escape down a laundry chute and sneak around together. Meanwhile, Derek refuses to leave with the Secret Service, instead going to get the kids, so it’s more of an ensemble thing, alternating between these groups of people, not a John-McClane-fly-in-the-ointment-picking-off-bad-guys-off-one-by-one situation. If it’s any consolation though they do get to climb up that ceiling panel that we all know is on all elevators and is easy to open and exit through.

Yes, Serena uses her computer wizardry to contact the outside world, and we get a not-as-exciting-as-UNDER-SIEGE-but-it’s-kind-of-the-same-idea communication with the vice preisdent (Clark Gregg, I LOVE TROUBLE) and the CIA director (Davis’ husband Julius Tennon, SMALL SOLDIERS).

I enjoy seeing Davis as a badass, and she looks cool in the sparring scene with Manny that foreshadows that tells us later she’ll throw a guy. Also she gets to do the female action hero trademark of having a fancy dress that she’s able to easily tear a piece off of to adapt to her situation. (She already wisely wore sneakers, so one of the other female characters does the thing where she has to abandon her high heels.)

This has the same fight coordinator as THE WOMAN KING, Filip Ciprian Florian (also did stunts on numerous DTV Seagal films), and the same stunt coordinator, Grant Powell (fight coordinator for 24 HOURS TO LIVE) plus Samuel Le (THE BATMAN). The second unit director is Darrin Prescott, who did JOHN WICK 1, 2 and 3 (also stunt coordinator of 1 and 2). Unfortunately I would never guess it was the work of such an accomplished action team – it’s not aggressively post-action like the BOURNE era, but it never really rises above okay, mostly being shot close up, not very clear, without much flow. There’s some shooting and stabbing and combat involving a reinforced limo, a missile launcher, and a helicopter, but not executed well enough that anybody should watch this mainly for the action.

What that leaves is the generic execution of a well-worn but appealing premise, so it’s watchable in the same way as, say, a lesser Gerard Butler movie. In fact, Starr basically seems like a Gerard Butler villain that wasn’t given enough to work with. You kinda laugh at how goofy and predictable the story is, but that’s fine because it’s doing the things you want to see. I guess the exception would be that they set up the prime minister as a total asshat, so you’re waiting for him to get Ellis-ed, but instead he notices how awesome Sutton is, starts to respect her, turns into a nice guy, even gives her a pep talk when she opens up to him about her experiences in the war.

One cool touch is when the president insists on risking herself to help the kitchen staff who have been taken hostage. It’s the heroic thing to do and also it works out well because it turns out the South African government put two special forces agents, Melokuhle (Theo Bongani Ndyalvane, VOYAGE OF TIME) and Lesedi (Noxolo Dlamini, SNIPER: THE LAST STAND) undercover as hotel staff, so they become capable new members of the squad.

It’s one of those movies that tries to be about politicians without having politics. Other than Prime Minister Everett’s initial disrespect and Sutton telling her daughter that she had to work twice as hard to get where she is, it doesn’t really deal with the sexism and racism that a Black woman American president would have to deal with in the year of our shame 2025. But I guess it does sorta resemble current politics because these crypto goons (some of them white supremacist Afrikaner conspiracy freaks!) are dead set on stopping the president from doing a charity program to help poor African farmers. Pretty much what has really happened but they didn’t have to take hostages or anything, they just hired teenage hackers from some racist video game bulletin board, sent them around to illegally dismantle our society and it turns out nobody knows how to stop that, they can just do it. All the other evil people in the country are kicking themselves that they never knew you could do that. They could’ve been the ones to murder the country if they’d known the One Weird Trick.

It’s easy these days for movies that try to be current to come out seeming naive, because it’s impossible to predict just how fucking stupid things will get by the release date. Of course, most movies are not trying to be an exact parallel to the moment we’re living in, and it could definitely be a good escapist fantasy for a movie to depict an America with a president who is good at things and tries to do a good job, not to mention an America where a woman could be president. To me it stings a little to watch it right now, because it’s an echo from a world not long ago when many people assumed we weren’t completely fucked. I have to imagine this was in the works before Kamala Harris was the presidential nominee (and Sutton doesn’t resemble her at all) but there’s kind of a weird thing where treasury secretary Joanna Worth (Elizabeth Marvel, grown up Mattie in TRUE GRIT) seems jealous of another woman becoming president before her, because she thought she was entitled to that honor. If only we were in a position to see whether that was a fair attack on Hillary Clinton or not.

G20 is written by Caitlin Parrish (Supergirl tv show) & Erica Weiss and Logan Miller & Noah Miller (the twin brothers who wrote WHITE BOY RICK), directed by Patricia Riggen (UNDER THE SAME MOON, LEMONADE MOUTH, THE 33). I can only quarter-heartedly recommend it because it really doesn’t excel beyond having the right premise and star to be amusing, yet it’s not as ridiculous and deranged as, say, a Roland Emmerich or Dean Devlin movie, not stupid enough to deliver constant laughs. I smiled when I saw the promotional art at the left here, and the movie is a basic, adequate enough adaptation of the feeling that poster gives me that I mildly enjoyed myself. As long as that’s all you’re looking for I won’t try to talk you out of it.