G20: Viola Davis stars in 'ludicrous' but fun action thriller

Teenager Ziba and her friends go on a 'wild bucket-list journey' around London

(Image credit: Amazon Prime Video)

published 18 April 2025

Viola Davis is better known for her soul-searching performances in The Help and Fences than for her "ass-kicking action roles", said Ed Potton in The Times. But she plays the "swashbuckling American president" in this "preposterous romp" with real gusto. The film, currently screening on Prime Video, imagines a G20 summit in Cape Town, at which the world leaders gathered for the occasion are taken hostage by an Australian terrorist mastermind (Antony Starr), who plans to crash the world economy so that he can make a fortune from crypto. Alas for him, he didn't count on Davis's war-hero president, Danielle Sutton, who along with other dignitaries (including Douglas Hodge's buffoonish British prime minister) escapes to foil his plot. It's "ludicrous" and "unburdened by narrative logic", but great fun nonetheless: where else would you see the head of the IMF throttle someone in a lift, or a scene in which the "South Korean president has his ear chopped off"?

Davis is a credible action hero, said Peter Debruge in Variety. She comfortably inhabits a role of the sort that Stallone and Schwarzenegger would once have played, machine-gunning her way down corridors and, at one point, slaying half-a-dozen henchmen in quick succession. Yet while the movie "doesn't need to be realistic or even remotely plausible", it works at a "shockingly low intelligence level" and suffers from a truly dreadful script. It feels like "a parody of itself". The editing and cinematography aren't up to much either, said Beatrice Loayza in The New York Times, but ultimately, it doesn't matter. For all its faults, G20 "plays well as a silly action movie".