Heads of State

In another era, “Heads of State” and “G20” (reviewed here) would have been competing movies at the box office, sort of the “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” of action-thrillers featuring the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister buddying up to battle bad guys. In this era, however, both “Heads of State” and “G20” were Amazon movies, released directly to Prime, as if they sought to cut potential losses in advance; if one doesn’t work, the other might. And truth is, if the underwhelming “G20” left you wishing it had sought to exploit the comedy potential between POTUS and PM, “Heads of State” has got you, as director Ilya Naishuller sort of re-imagines “My Fellow Americans” (1996) as an action-comedy rather than a comedy-adventure.

With more than a whiff of current reality, American President Will Derringer (John Cena) is a movie star, of fictional “Water Cobra” franchise frame, and seems to be the President as he sees the President on a movie poster of the Presidency. No wonder, then, British PM Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), a pragmatic pessimist who served in the SAS, can’t stand him. It’s an Odd Coupling put under extreme stress when Sam hitches a ride with Will aboard Air Force One in a public demonstration of breaking bread only for the President’s plane to be attacked. Before it’s shot down, the two heads of state parachute to something akin to safety in Belarus, traversing to a safe house in Poland by foot, all while putting their heads together to try and unravel the multi-layered mystery of who wants them dead. 

Will and Sam are eventually joined in this raggedy journey by Noelle Bisset (Priyanka Chopra), an MI6 agent and Sam’s old flame. A big Bollywood star, Chopra acquits herself well, but her character can’t help but feel semi-extraneous, there to provide a requisite romance that never ignites, epitomizing an overabundance of ingredients that don’t entirely mix. Indeed, as the chief bad guy, Paddy Considine barely makes an impression, and neither do his psychopathic subordinates, like Olga, who just feels like a halfhearted attempt to recreate Pom Klementieff’s psychopathic subordinate from the seventh “Mission: Impossible” movie. On the other hand, Naishuller might improbably waste the La Tomatina prologue, never creatively integrating thousands of people throwing tomatoes at each other, but she infuses other action scenes with enough fizz to compensate for that unavoidable straight-to-streaming look. Jack Quaid as a CIA station agent becoming something like a geeky guitar tech getting the chance to shine with a guitar solo of his own demonstrates the kind of good fun I’m looking for in a movie like this one while a car chase involving not just the Presidential state car but a firetruck satisfactorily exemplifies the old Ebert adage One Damn Thing After Another. 

As for the plot, the whole conspiracy boils down to figuratively blowing up NATO as the bickering President and PM are made to understand the importance of standing united. That has a trace of the real world, too, and yet rather than committing to wicked irony or full-fledged earnestness, it comes across as not quite either. When the chief culprit claims to be a better actor than the President, you can imagine an 80s action-comedy version of this really turning that into a raucous punchline. Here, it just falls flat. Maybe it’s the Amazon of it all, but like a game where the refs hope never to be noticed, despite being a movie about two politicians, “Heads of State” never wants you to notice politics. Not that it eradicates them entirely. Cena isn’t sending up anyone, exactly, but his performance is defter in its humor than I might have imagined, undercutting American exceptionalism at every turn while believing in it with all his might. When the President tries to psych himself up to jump from a moving train, Cena exclaims “Star and Stripes forever!” in the voice of a man not quite sure if he believes it.