I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is kind of on fire right now—sometimes more literally than figuratively—so it can feel a little frivolous to focus on entertainment at the moment, especially when the entertainment itself is fairly frivolous itself. Especially when it touches on the real things that are stoking and fanning the aforementioned flames. So I was a tad bit hesitant to watch Heads of State, Amazon Prime’s new streaming film about a movie star American President fumbling through global relations while an embattled UK Prime Minister struggles to tolerate his counterpart who seems to be doing it for the Vine. But ultimately, the star power of John Cena (Vacation Friends, The Suicide Squad) and Idris Elba (Knuckles, The Office) reuniting again was too much for curiosity to not get the better of me. And boy am I glad I succumbed to temptation.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a good movie by your (well, my) film standards. In many ways, it’s monumentally stupid. In most ways, really. It’s whimsical, it’s meaningless, it’s dumb, and it’s kind of stupid fun. Politicians are hard for me to make fun of in this current climate—not because they don’t deserve it, not because they’re not dumb and insidious, but because what they’re doing is hurting real people in horrible ways. Making light of them sometimes makes me feel like I’m making light of what they’re doing and we’re relying on comedy to get us through a time when it feels like there’s no real leadership in the world other than Jon Stewart. But I’ve said many times before that things like movies and TV are as important now as they’ve ever been, because in troubled times, we can allow ourselves to be weighed down by the problems of the world as we go down deeper and deeper doomscrolling rabbit holes. Good news is hard to find, but bad news is all around us. So as hard as it can be to allow yourself some escapism, it’s also important.
And that’s precisely what Heads of State is. Pure escapism. A movie where a celebrity becomes POTUS and gets together with the British PM to spearhead a global clean energy initiative while trying to strengthen our relationship with our allies is a surprisingly comforting thing to watch. Sure, President Will Derringer (of course he’s even named after a gun) is a big dummy and a sucker for public adulation, but he actually wants to use his celebrity to make the world a better place. That’s not something I’ve been used to seeing lately and it’s refreshing. Elba’s Prime Minister Sam Clarke is no-nonsense, getting up early run in his Arsenal FC cap before getting to the thankless work of governing a country that doesn’t like the job he’s doing. And it’s clear that he doesn’t respect Derringer, who unlike Clarke, has never done a day’s worth of public service before reaching the highest office in the land, whereas Clarke was a member of the British armed services. Like any buddy action film, it always starts with polar opposites who don’t like each other and these two do not like each other at all. It certainly checks that box; it’s quite comedic to see them at odds, with their advisors doing their best to make things at least look copacetic.
Although, this movie doesn’t quite start with them at odds. It starts with an overly serious scene where British intelligence agent Noel Bisset, played by Priyanka Chopra Jonas (Quantico, Baywatch), oversees a joint British MI6/American CIA operation to take down notorious arms dealer Viktor Gradov, played by Paddy Considine, fresh off his great turn in Deep Cover. On her team is the red shirtiest of red shirts that I’ve seen since the opening scene of Twisters, who predictably get immediately killed, leaving her missing in action and the countries reeling over a very public failure. But once we get to our politicians playing nice, the movie loses its pretense of being too serious for its own good and leans into the silliness. Cena’s fully in his funny, warm-hearted big man phase and has been for some time now and it just always works. Cena has so much charisma as Will that you can’t help but enjoy every moment he’s on screen. He had me laughing at just about every turn; his comedic timing is excellent. Yes, he can very much beat you up; in fact, I’m almost certain he could pick me up, roll me into a ball, and then throw me down a bowling alley lane and get a strike without breaking a sweat. Cena looks unimaginably strong, to the point that it feels like if you were to actually try to punch him, your fist would bounce off and knock you out, leaving you seeing stars. But he brings his natural warmth to the role, which makes him feel soft and cuddly, like a big wooly mammoth on roller skates.
After a disastrous joint press conference between the two of them, their advisors (played by Ted Lasso’s Sarah Niles and Coupling’s Richard Coyle) devise a plan to have them fly together on Air Force One to the NATO summit where they’re sharing their clean energy initiative with their allies. It takes some cajoling, but eventually they’re convinced and the setup for the film is complete. By the time we see the Air Force One moment that’s promised in the trailers, in which one of the nameless bad guys emits some real White House Down Jimmi Simpson energy, you’ve had enough time to grow a genuine fondness for our two politicians, with Elba’s seriousness as a politician playing a great foil to the over-the-top Cena. There’s some contrived details that don’t really feel like they hold water as to why they can’t just wait for a rescue, but in this film’s mix of today’s political climate and general silliness, I kind of have no recourse but just to go with it, because I don’t know what’s realistic in politics anymore. And thus, they begin the long hike from Belarus to Warsaw and encounter some difficulties along the way. Usually in silly action movies, there’s at least one thing that’s so over the top that it bothers me, but here, everything is so cartoonishly over the top that it just seems to work. You’ve got two great actors who are both accomplished in action and comedy and they are in top form here, carrying a movie with a very ho-hum plot and generic villains, leaving you having fun in a way that you really didn’t expect.
You can tell that Elba and Cena were having a good time filming it and it comes through—it’s like watching a team that’s really in form out on the pitch just having a good time and dribbling through the opposing team, bagging no look goals and the odd rabona in the process. It shows. They’re just having a good time and trying to make sure you have a good time too and more often than not, it works. Seeing two action stars trying to play at fighting like they have no training at all works comedically on its own, with the juxtaposition of their physical statures and action film filmographies (in the case of Cena, both in and out of character) being played to great effectiveness. Watching fist fights unfold like accidents, as they clumsily attempt to get back to safety, the sole survivors of a terrible tragedy is very satisfying to watch; Clarke’s training kicks in and Derringer’s fighting feels more like Looney Tunes than Peacemaker. While the movie doesn’t shrug off the loss of life, it doesn’t dwell on it either—but it does address it. One of the things that can almost always turn me off to a character, especially a protagonist, is when they’re callous about death, particularly the deaths of innocents. But in this case, the movie takes a breath and lets you know that they do care before moving on.
And it’s in those small moments that this big, stupid, fun movie shows that it, like Cena himself, has a heart and doesn’t mind showing it (seriously, John Cena seems like a really good dude). Both Derringer and Clarke care and it takes this movie into something above simple slapstick parody. Again, I’m not going to say this is a good movie, but there’s something there that makes it genuinely enjoyable. It’s almost quaint—in the midst of this huge amount of unlikely action, you see two politicians at the top of their elected offices who actually just want to help people lead better lives finding a way to get along. And yes, there’s a fairly obvious mystery at hand that is resolved far too quickly, but as far as conspiracies go, it’s handled in some easy exposition dumps that don’t bog down the movie too much and inflate its runtime, which is already a bit long at 1 hour and 56 minutes. But it doesn’t really lull, so you don’t feel it. Off the top of my head, I can’t really think of many scenes that felt completely unnecessary, bar perhaps an early one with Paddy Considine’s Gradov being a full on comic book villain at his estate, that perhaps could have been snappier, and the aforementioned opening sequence with Priyanka Chopra Jonas does overstay its welcome by some time. When the marketing material around a movie centers almost solely on its two main stars, opening with a scene that neither of them are in leads to a foregone conclusion that takes a little too long to be realized. From the first frame, you know everyone in the scene is going to get killed (although it was nice to see, however briefly, Sharlto Copley getting some work because District 9 is a modern classic), and the scene does nothing to make you care about any of them or feel their loss through the movie. Even Solo did a better job of setting up its sacrificial lambs, and that’s saying something. But, as that scene sets up the central conflict (and establishes Chopra Jonas’s love for bad puns), you couldn’t cut it completely. But like the scene at Gradov’s estate, it just needed to be cut down to a shorter, faster paced vignette. After that, though, the movie really does even out and keeps you laughing most of the way through.
That’s not to say it’s otherwise flawless in pacing or characterization, there are a few inconsistencies (like Clarke mentioning that he did deep research into Derringer in one scene and shortly after being surprised to learn his middle name), and there are scenes you’d have expected to happen that never do, but overall, if you’re looking for a good time, Heads of State delivers. It’s an easy watch—in the same vein as movies like White House Down, but doesn’t take itself too seriously like the Olympus Has Fallen movies, which were mostly funny because of how good they thought they were (and then a bit sad because of how many they made when I still can’t get a sequel to The Nice Guys)—that takes no big swings and makes no big misses. The film relies heavily on Cena’s and Elba’s easy chemistry and strong charisma, with some great scene-stealing cameos along the way, and, really, that’s enough. It’s the kind of movie you could watch on a Sunday afternoon when you’re trying to forget that Monday is around the corner or that you could put on when just needing something to lift your spirits a little and help you forget the world. And I’ve got to say that I really appreciate that. It lacks the depth of a movie like Prime’s own Deep Cover or even White House Down, but for an action-comedy that isn’t couched in a century of comic book lore, it does the job admirably. Will this reach 2 Fast 2 Furious levels of bad movie enjoyment for me? Only time will tell, but I know that this is one I’ll be leaving on my watchlist to watch again later.
