Film Pick of the Week: G20 - review by Yvette Huddleston
G20 Prime Video, review by Yvette Huddleston
Viola Davis absolutely commands the screen – and the action – in this breathlessly paced thriller, directed by Mexican director Patricia Riggen, set at a G20 summit of world leaders at a heavily guarded luxury hotel in Cape Town, South Africa.
Davis plays American president Danielle Sutton who is preparing to travel to the summit with the aim of persuading international allies to buy into her idea of helping the world’s poorer nations by enabling them to get better access to digital banking. Unfortunately, that noble agenda is disrupted by a band of well-organised mercenaries, led by bitter army veteran Rutledge (Antony Starr), a former Australian Special Forces soldier, who storm the compound and take the conference delegates hostage. Their motive is pure greed. Their plan is to undermine the whole summit, broadcast to the world, using deep-fake technology, that the politicians are corrupt and are planning to steal the money meant for developing countries and persuade viewers across the globe to invest in cryptocurrency.
Sutton has a military background – which she modestly doesn’t make a big deal of publicly, but the skills acquired in her former career come in very handy indeed as the situation unfolds. She manages to escape from the kidnappers along with her secret service agent Manny Ruiz (Ramon Rodriguez), the British Prime Minister Oliver Everett (Douglas Hodge), head of the International Monetary Fund Elena Romano (Sabrina Impacciatore) and the First Lady of South Korea Han Min-Seo (MeeWha Alana Lee). Meanwhile Sutton’s husband, First Gentleman Derek (Anthony Anderson) is trying to keep their teenage daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) and son Demetrius (Christopher Farrar) safe.
Sutton then has a pretty tall order on her hands in a race against time. There are two points of jeopardy: to make sure that her own family survives, and then there is the small matter of saving the whole world. Needless to say she is up to the task and Davis pulls all this off with great aplomb – she is clearly enjoying herself in a leading action role. At the age of 59 she is a fantastic role model, not only for her fictional daughter, but for middle-aged women everywhere.
The plot doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny, it requires a fair bit of suspension of disbelief and the narrative takes some pretty preposterous swerves but, thanks mostly to Davis and the tightly choreographed action sequences, it certainly delivers on the high-octane thrills front.