G20

“G20” is too dumb to be taken seriously yet takes itself a little too seriously to just be entertainingly dumb, echoing its own confused politics, inadvertently designed to both enrage the right and irritate the left. In that way, director Patricia Riggen’s movie is a success in so much as it might bring a divided America together, if only for a moment, to shout: “This should have been better!” That’s because the premise is designed to send every middling thriller fan’s heart aflutter: when the G20 summit in Capetown, South Africa is taken hostage by techno-terrorist Rutledge (Anthony Starr), intending to make himself rich through cryptocurrency by using deepfake technology to exploit the gathered world leaders, American President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) and a band of geopolitical misfits – the UK Prime Minister (Douglas Hodge), the South Korean First Lady (MeeWha Alana Lee), head of the International Monetary Fund (Sabrina Impacciatore), and a loyal secret service agent (Ramón Rodríguez) – manage to evade capture and fight back (resist?) all while the First Husband (Anthony Anderson) seeks to guide he and POTUS’s two kids to safety. This provides several enticing set-ups that, alas, lack inventive and even worse, gleeful payoffs. Unlike the President’s daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) who is introduced by ditching her security detail to live it up for one night, “G20” never cuts loose. 

Davis, at least, meets the moment, using that opening of her Serena’s night out to inform how she plays the role, like raising your daughter is as exhausting as running the country. That grounds the character, but as “G20” progresses, she is supposed to become larger than life and in the murky color and unimaginative framing, Riggen never renders her that way. When President Sutton straps Kevlar over her red dress, it should be a moment of exultant lunacy (business in front, party underneath) but just falls flat. Ditto Rutledge. Starr brings pep to the part, but there is only so much you can do when your climactic moment is having a crypto wallet slip through your fingers. In theory, this moment is funny, a falling killer scene repurposed, but “G20” doesn’t know it’s funny, and so it isn’t. And that lack of fun is a real weight. The only time “G20” achieves true liftoff is when the IMF head and British PM go for a ride in POTUS’s armored vehicle, bold enough to go to the very edge of parody, memorably conveyed in Impacciatore’s unhinged facial expression. On the other hand, when Sutton and Rutledge come face to face, finally ready to throw down, the giant G20 seal logo on the floor effectively setting this up as a championship bout in a makeshift UFC ring, Riggen stops short. My laughter gave way to a groan, one more in a long string of missed opportunities.