REVIEW: G20 (2025)

Movie Reviews

G20 has been a looming threat for the last couple of months, a movie that looked so bad that it almost had to be covered because it would epitomize everything wrong with the state of modern entertainment. It was just released on Amazon Prime, and it sort of lives up to expectations. It’s not as relentlessly preachy as I thought it would be, and there are hints of a better film that pop up from time to time. But it’s still a lousy movie, one with a few obvious axes to grind, but it’s so ineptly written that it undermines its own points. Ironically, these inconsistencies are what would have made it good had they been explored more and used to form character arcs and conflicts. Unfortunately, they went the strong, independent woman route, and they did it the same lazy way most movies do today.

American President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) attends a G20 conference in South Africa with her husband (Anthony Anderson) and two children. There, she will announce a plan to give cryptocurrency access to African farmers. But before the conference can start, a small army of terrorists led by former Australian soldier Edward Rutledge (Antony Starr) takes the world leaders hostage. Sutton escapes capture with a small group of allies, and she must stop Rutledge and save her family… and the world financial system.

One look at the G20 trailer makes you assume you’re in for wall-to-wall girl boss moments, and the opening scenes set this up as well. Much hay is made of Sutton being a war hero for her service in Iraq, and she’s even seen practicing martial arts with a Secret Service agent who was a buddy of hers from the Army. Then, there are the constant references to how she has the deck stacked against her because she’s a woman; she had to work “twice as hard” to get where she is (an elected office), she steels herself for dealing with the British Prime Minister because he hates women, she’s referred to as “strong” constantly, and she describes her outfit for the G20 conference as having a “superhero cape.” But for a while, I admired (to use the term loosely) the film’s restraint because when the action begins, the warrior woman stuff is kept to a minimum. The group Sutton is running around with includes her Secret Service friend, and for a while, he does most of the action stuff. Sutton is involved, but she’s mostly shown as being vulnerable, only getting kills when she has a gun, while the Secret Service guy does the physical fighting. I wondered if G20 might be smarter than it looked.

But I needn’t have gotten excited; G20 soon allows Sutton to do some impossible physical feats, which is okay for an action movie until they get too ridiculous. Sutton is somehow able to manhandle much bigger men, knocking them all over the place when she should barely be able to move them. The film doesn’t even use the size difference to mine some suspense; at one point, she’s faced with “the big guy,” the central physical threat to the hero in an action movie, and she completely dominates him. And despite showing her practicing martial arts at the beginning of the film, she doesn’t use precise strikes at pressure points or anything you’d see in a much better female-led action movie like, for example, The Long Kiss Goodnight; she just beats down a huge guy because she can, muscles strained and rippling the entire time. The director, Patricia Riggen, even films one scene to look like a video game (a trope I hate and wish would go away forever because it never looks good) as if to let us know not to take anything that happens seriously.

What makes this worse is that certain moments suggest that G20 could have been much better. One of Sutton’s fellow escapees is, of course, the woman-hating British Prime Minister, and he’s an idiot who almost gets them killed a couple of times (once in the dumbest way possible), but when he sees her in action, he starts to admire her. Then, he’s almost immediately out of the movie. They could have done much more with their camaraderie; in fact, turning this into a buddy movie with a woman President and a Prime Minister who doesn’t like women in power could have made for some great tension if they allowed them both to be the heroes, to clash in more interesting ways, and to have them ultimately respect and find worth in each other – the chauvinist realizing that women aren’t so bad, and the feminist seeing the value in toxic masculinity. Even more egregiously, there’s a scene in which Sutton suggests that her military heroism was greatly exaggerated, and she used this to get herself elected. Why not play this up and have it be her character arc? Ditch her little cadre and have her be alone, having to rely on her skills, which she doubts exist because she’s never had to test them, then allow her to slowly remember her training and finally rise to the occasion, proving her mettle to herself and the world. But it’s brought up and then disappears; the villain even uses it as a reason to hate her, but it doesn’t come until very late in the movie, so it barely registers.

In fact, she has little conflict with the antagonist, who exists just to be a bad guy. Antony Starr plays a fantastic villain on The Boys, and even when it’s at its worst, he makes Homelander compelling. That makes it so disappointing that G20 wastes him as Rutledge, never capitalizing on his charm or his ability to play an unhinged maniac barely masking his madness. Rutledge’s evil plan involves cryptocurrency, with the movie throwing in a bunch of related gobbledygook about crypto wallets, blockchains, deepfakes, and whatever else is connected to emerging technology. (Between this and the new Mission: Impossible movies that put Tom Cruise up against AI, action movie plots are getting a lot lamer.) But his actual goals are muddy and seem to shift as the movie goes along. Does he want to prop up crypto to take power away from the elite and give it to the people? Is he angry about the G20 countries giving money to Africans? Is he greedy and looking to cash in on crypto while playing everyday citizens as suckers? Does he want revenge for being forced to fight in what he considers an unjust war? At different points, all of these are offered as his motivation, like the filmmakers wanted to throw in everything they don’t like (crypto bros, deepfakers, anti-establishment types, people who don’t want to give away foreign aid). And since he has no scenes with Sutton, there’s no real conflict between the two established, so you’re not excited to see her get him.

G20 strains all credulity to make its plot work. Why would no one raise eyebrows at the Secret Service hiring a mercenary outfit to provide security for the G20 summit? Are we supposed to believe that’s normal? Then again, it doesn’t seem to know much about the Secret Service;  when her agent friend tells her he can’t stop to save other hostages because she must be his priority, Sutton tells him she doesn’t have to listen to him because she calls the shots. This is actually not true; in a situation where there’s a threat to the President’s life, the Secret Service is in charge, and they get the President to safety no matter what he or she says. Air Force One, another movie where the President is an action hero (and another much better movie than this), deals with this in a more logical way, with the Secret Service doing exactly that before they’re killed off, and Harrison Ford is left to save the day. To that end, G20 should have killed the Secret Service guy early, so Sutton was left to her own devices. And Sutton’s wayward daughter is one of those preternaturally smart kids who can use technology better than Tony Stark, so she becomes instrumental in stopping the terrorists. But maybe the worst logical leap is when the terrorists take the G20 conference hostage; it’s the most inept, poorly staged attack ever filmed, with the bad guys looking completely unprepared and incompetent, allowing various bodyguards to shoot them before they open fire and looking stupefied as Sutton and her group escape. They planned this operation to the very last detail… except for the lynchpin of the whole thing where they take the world leaders hostage. (Remember Under Siege – yet another much better movie – where Tommy Lee Jones and his men knew exactly where the guard patrols were on the boat so they could take it quickly and with as little trouble as possible?)

G20 is not the excruciating nightmare it looked like; it’s just your run-of-the-mill bad movie, an empty, poorly plotted dud that makes whatever points it wants to make ineptly and fails to entertain or even lecture. There’s no reason to waste a perfectly good couple of hours on it.

***

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