Twenty-five years ago, an action-comedy filmed on location in Europe and starring two of the world’s most likable actors would have grossed $100 million in theaters. These days, it gets quietly released to streaming on a holiday weekend.1
Amazon’s Heads of State (free on Prime!)2 is a type of movie you see a lot of on streaming these days: mismatched protagonists who must shoot, punch, and wisecrack their way through cartoonish villains and around ELI5 geopolitical storylines. These flicks are designed to go down easy—not to take long to digest—and therefore should be graded on a curve: Did this make my laundry-folding more or less enjoyable?
For Heads of State, the answer is more.3 It’s not a film you’ll come back to, but it gets the job done—just like a narrow House and Senate majority, apparently.
The movie follows two heads of state,4 recently elected U.S. President Will Derringer (John Cena) and embattled U.K. Prime Minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), who come together before a NATO summit to promote a transatlantic energy partnership.
Right away, their contrasting styles pit them against each other, putting the “Special Relationship” in peril. Derringer, an action-movie-star-turned-politician, makes real the question: What if The Rock (or, in an earlier era, Arnold Schwarzenegger) became president? Derringer’s politics are hard to pin down, all the better for selling this movie to a polarized public. His let’s-be-friends optimism suggests the left, he espouses some of the rah-rah machismo of the traditional right, and he’s allied himself with at least a few members of the America First protectionist crowd. Clarke, meanwhile, is a grouchy policy wonk5 who resents the celebritization of politics, loves a good whiskey, and is somehow polling poorly despite record-low unemployment.
After a press conference that goes only slightly better than the one in which Trump lectured Zelensky, President Derringer invites PM Clarke to ride with him to the NATO meeting on Air Force One so they can show the public they get along. But the prez’s plane is infiltrated and shot down by a gang working for a Russian arms dealer (Paddy Considine, who’s notably Irish) as part of a plot to gain access to the ECHELON global surveillance system. With just two working parachutes, the two rivals end up stranded in Belarus without the Secret Service or security. Not knowing whom they can trust, they hopscotch from safe house to stolen car to train,6 as the Russian baddies try to finish them off. They are aided only by a presumed-dead MI6 agent (Priyanka Chopra-Jonas), who pops up whilst trying to kill the terrorists who killed her team.
Let’s pause here for a moment to mention that none of this is what you might call “believable.” The entire premise of the film rests on the idea that the most powerful men from the most powerful nations on earth can be taken out by an arms dealer and a handful of henchmen. Okay. Fine, I’ve seen Air Force One. But that they wouldn’t immediately show up at an embassy (or the Polish border or…in a crowd of people with cellphones) and be, like, “Hey, we’re the guys you elected” strains credulity by taking to 11 the Deep State paranoia that fuels most geopolitical espionage flicks.7 In this world, no police, army, or security can match the endless supply of weapons of a rogue villain.8 Yet John Cena and Idris Elba and Chopra-Jonas can.
But movies invented the suspension of disbelief. And without it, you wouldn’t get Cena and Elba punching Belarusian gopniks and pratfalling through Poland. The film makes hay out of Clarke being actual former military and Derringer just posing as a tough guy, giving the action choreography a playful energy you don’t get from straight shoot-em-ups. The movie has plenty of Olympus Has Fallen in its DNA, but the filmmakers have also watched Midnight Run on repeat. It moves fast, it’s funny, and Elba and Cena both know what film they’re in—one that makes vague allusions to contemporary politics but is ultimately more about encouraging Americans of all political stripes to subscribe for auto-deliveries of toilet paper.
There’s a metaphor here for the transition from newspapers to Substack, but I can’t think of it. Give me a minute.
In case you forgot, Amazon bought MGM Studios. Get ready to see James Bond on the big screen—by which I mean the 55” TV in your living room.
Although I know many people who multitask while watching films and series, I’m not one of them. But I’ll presume this would spark joy whilst Marie Kondo-ing the hell out of some t-shirts.
One of which, the movie reminds us, isn’t actually a head of state, making the title of this film curious.
We know this because he keeps telling us how much he’s into politics for the policy. We never see him creating it.
If they wanted to make this as IP, maybe they could have thrown Steve Martin in there as an image consultant and linked it to the Planes, Trains & Automobiles universe.
Then again: Mike Pence not wanting to get in the car with Secret Service.
In Europe, at least. In the U.S., every rural police force has a tank and submachine guns.