Viola Davis Swaggers Through Bumpy Political Thriller

In G20, Viola Davis joins the pantheon of action heroes tasked with saving the world from a catastrophe. The Oscar-winning actress plays Danielle Sutton, a steely veteran, mother of two and president of the United States. When we meet the leader of the free world, she’s tensely battling with her 17-year-old daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) after the angsty teenager snuck out to party at a Georgetown bar. 

How Serena managed to outwit her Secret Service agents and end up on the late night news shows vexes Sutton, who’s trying to maintain a flawless and relatively low-key reputation as the first Black woman president of the North American nation. In that way, G20, directed by Patricia Riggen and streaming April 10 on Prime Video, feels like a relic of a timeline in which Vice President Kamala Harris’ future in the Oval Office seemed all but assured. The film weaves the social and political pressures faced by a Black woman ascending to the highest office into a bumpy story about how she’s eventually thrust into an explosive global crisis.

Riggen, working from a screenplay by Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller, struggles to balance the tonal requirements of each thread, which results in a film that’s slow to get going. But once the principal heroes and villains have been established and the perfunctory narrative throat-clearing is out of the way, G20 finds its groove as a solid popcorn action flick. 

In interviews about G20, Davis has said she did the movie because she wanted to star in something popular. While this film doesn’t shy away from heavy themes, the whole operation hinges on the actress’ confident portrayal of the kind of action hero usually played by white male movie stars. It’s essentially her Air Force One. (To be fair, Davis isn’t unfamiliar with this genre: She did lead an army of women warriors in precolonial West Africa in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King.) And while one does wish that Davis had a less schmaltzy and more coherent story to work with here, G20 manages to deliver where it matters. The stunts (coordinated by Grant Powell) are relatively inventive and appropriately balletic, and the film features a gallery of supporting characters worth rooting for.

After a reporter questions Sutton’s ability to protect the nation if she can’t even manage her kid, the president decides to take the whole family — husband Derek (Anthony Anderson), daughter Serena and son Demetrius (Christopher Farrar) — with her to the G20 summit in Cape Town, South Africa. They are accompanied by the president’s friend and longtime security detail Agent Manny Ruiz (Ramón Rodríguez) and U.S. Treasury Secretary Joanna Worth (Elizabeth Marvel).

This year’s conference is a big deal for Sutton because she needs to recruit other nations to join her efforts to give micro-loans to farmers in Africa, a step she believes will play a significant role in ending world hunger. There are plenty of doubters, though, including British Prime Minister Oliver Everett (Douglas Hodge), and key players she needs to convince like Elena Romano (The White Lotus season two‘s Sabrina Impacciatore), the new head of the IMF. 

The world’s most powerful leaders arrive in Cape Town with relatively little fanfare, but that changes later when the heads of state are held hostage in the hotel’s conference room by a rogue group, led by Rutledge (Antony Starr), a former U.S. army officer, determined to short the market. They are functionally crypto bros — with a bit of an anarchist spirit — who use artificial intelligence and deep fakes to convince workers around the world to back bitcoin currency. They want the people to rise up against ineffective leadership and recognize that they are being brainwashed into paying for endless wars. Rutledge makes some fair points, but too bad they’re tainted by an insatiable greed. 

During the early moments of mayhem — in which Rutledge and his global team of mercenaries breach the hotel’s maximum security system and hack into its surveillance framework — Sutton and Manny manage to escape the conference room. They are followed by Oliver, Elena and Han Min-Seo (a scene-stealing Meewha Alana Lee), the first lady of South Korea. Elsewhere in the hotel, Serena, Demetrius and Derek dodge their armed captors and find a way to escape. 

G20 takes place almost exclusively in this hotel and its events happen over the course of a single night. The tight framing is helpful for a film that can wobble under the demands of its various plot points, some of which end up competing for attention. At first, Sutton’s goal is to find a way out of the hotel, but it soon becomes clear that she is the one the mercenaries are after. Her position as U.S. president makes her critical to the plan to crash the global market, and in order to lure her back to the conference room Rutledge starts killing her colleagues. That plan adds tension to the relatively flimsy stakes of the film, turning a straightforward escape plot into a more gripping game of cat and mouse. Sutton must reverse course and now try to find a way to save her fellow leaders, her family and the world. 

It’s no small task, but Davis navigates it with believable conviction. She’s having fun with the role, roundhouse kicking villains and toting a gun while wearing her evening gown. The actress embraces even the silliest parts of the story and that commitment makes it easier to forgive the garish visual effects and obvious telegraphing. G20 is really a film for fans of the actress and an audience ready to see some smooth-brained chaos.