G20 (2025), Viola McClane vs. the terrorists

G20 has four screenwriters. Four. And none of them are able to bring any minimally fresh and original ideas to the classic, overused Die Hard formula. Millionaire / powerful people kidnapped in an ultra-luxurious salon?. Check. Terrorist is violent, sadistic and kills random people?. Check again. Do we have scenes on rooftops?. Yes. Are there RPGs fired at armored vehicles?. Yes again. Do the hero and the villain have a duel of wits via walkie talkies?. Of course. Do we have elevator fights?. But of course, how could they be missing!. Are there helicopters being shot down and bad people falling into the void?. Yep. Miss the “ho ho ho, now I have a machine gun” and the combo is complete.

The thing is, to spice up this Die Hard recycling, the hero is now a black female president of the United States, a sort of badass version of Michelle Obama (the most obvious inspiration) but with a military background. That theoretically makes her a credible heroine... until reality proves otherwise. While Viola Davis is a fantastic actress, she's great in tough female roles like Amanda Waller - where she exudes venom from every pore -, and she has proven herself as an action heroine in The Woman King, here she looks out of shape for what the role requires. She looks strong but not agile - the editing must make many cuts to make her fights look credible, besides inventing the excuse of a damaged knee to justify why Davis does not move with the agility of a ninja - and, to top it off, she is dressed in a red ball gown that does not do her any favors. At least she looks a lot chunkier and tougher when she dons the military uniform of one of the terrorists she's taken down, looking reasonably capable of having a hand-to-hand fight with the show's massive villains.

But it's all obvious. Just the president's daughter is a top tier hacker who is the only one in this situation who can alter the terrorists' cryptic systems and send an SOS out of the mansion where they are all being held hostage. There's a secret service agent who, even though he has two hundred bullets in her body, always revives just in time to help when Viola Davis is fighting someone who physically outmatches her. Or there are just two South African secret service agents who kick ass at the most unexpected times and look like they were trained in Wakanda.

While G20 is another pathetic Die Hard clone - sprinkled with drops of White House Down / Olympus has Fallen -, when one begins to read between the lines and starts to find the ideological subtext, the film becomes a monumentally ridiculous monstrosity and totally devoid of any hint of realism. What I am saying is nothing new: there has been a cultural battle going on in the United States for a long time and now all series and films end up taking a political line, whether liberal or conservative. As in Landman where a Texan Billy Bob Thornton talks about oil being a necessary evil, that renewable energies are a lie, and that global warming is something inevitable that one must accept. On the other side of the counter we have Robert De Niro in Zero Day, where a massive cyber-terrorist attack has caused a digital blackout across the United States. De Niro is given extraordinary powers and, when he captures the suspects, not only does he not subject them to any kind of torture (despite the fact that the nation is about to descend into anarchy) but he demands that they have a lawyer present to respect their legal rights, and he himself personally convinces them to tell the truth (without injecting them with truth serum -pentothal -, without hitting them, just talking with the calmness of a priest) with a moralizing talk that they should not let the nation fall into the abyss and that telling the truth to the government is a patriotic and/or moral obligation.

That kind of ultra-liberal absurdities are present in G20 (I clarify that my position is apolitical, but there comes a time when one gets tired of receiving moralistic speeches of all kinds and colors, shoehorned into products that should be mere entertainment; if I want to get political, I better watch of my own free will a Costa Gavras film or a documentary on class inequality and / or the injustices that exist in the world). The black woman president, the heroic Latino bodyguard, the noble mission to end world hunger by creating an international fund with cryptocurrencies (!). But, as in Die Hard, the terrorists (with Antony Starr at the head, in full psycho mode but without superpowers) do not come to destroy these noble purposes but are white-collar thieves who have found a way to profit from this situation and become billionaires. To do so, they kidnap all the G20 leaders, force them to read a ridiculous text (“The swift Hindu bat played the saxophone...”, oh, yes: the same sample text that Windows shows you every time you install a new TrueType font file in your PC's operating system; yet another example of the genius of the guys who wrote this), and with the voice and images, an AI proceeds to create deepfake videos that they will upload to social networks to discredit them and provoke a worldwide stock market run. But each of the videos is the height of pathetic (“we're going to get rich and stay in power for the rest of our lives,” says the fake Australian prime minister in the foreground) and, when the American vice president played by Clark Gregg discovers these clips, he grabs his head and exclaims, “in a world where disinformation has more power than information, this fake message is a bombshell.”

The problem is not that the content of the fake videos is idiotic; in that in light of the events that occurred in the real world on April 2, 2025, they look monumentally naive. If the film were shot today, the faked mandataries would say something like “let's declare a world tariff war on China” and there the script would have gained tons of credibility points. Now those are statements that would have generated a global stock market crash.

But the script is riddled with such pearls of goofy symbolism and naive ideology. At one point the badass version of Michelle Obama is the only one who can guide, in her escape from the range of the villains, a Boris Johnson clone - a drunk, clownish and cynical British Prime Minister - and an insecure IMF director, a woman who pretends to fight her inferiority complex by wearing shoes with huge heels to look taller than the President of the United States (!). Instantly the U.S. has an armed force in place, ready to move in and free the hostages... but awaits the go-ahead from the other 19 G20 countries because, if one of the hostages dies, it may be seen not only as a unilateral decision but as an act of war (!). And since Viola Davis does not play a realistic character but a symbol, she cannot be cruel and kill with her hands, even when her husband and children are being tortured by a group of ruthless villains. She kills from a distance - with better marksmanship than John Wick - or simply drops the bad guys from great heights without making the slightest effort to try to save them.

While for the cinephile G20 it's a spectacle that ranges from lame to stupid, the film will probably work better for most people who just want to spend a couple of hours of their time with a neatly made action movie. In and of itself, it's not such a bad film that you'd come to hate it. It has pace, the action is decently shot, and even Viola Davis has a couple of dramatic moments to show off, displaying a performance that is light years ahead of the miserable quality of the script. But, as it is, it is a monumental waste of resources since with these actors and these sets they could have given birth to something much more entertaining, original and of higher quality. As always money abounds and ideas are scarce, a combo that always ends up generating the same result: disposable and easily forgettable products like this one.

Other reviews from April 2025:

• The Good, the Bad, The Weird (2008), a spaghetti...eastern? - Underrated Comedies
• G20 (2025), Viola McClane vs. the terrorists - Fresh Film Focus
• Holland (2025), another lousy Fargo clone - Fresh Film Focus

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