I didn’t have high expectations for Heads of State going in, mostly because few subgenres say, “Automatic Bad Movie” like “action movie, starring A-list actors, that goes straight to a streaming service.” Heads of State, though, pleasantly surprised me. It’s silly, contains little realism, and flirts with major geopolitical questions without having anything to say about them.
But the movie’s fun, thanks largely to witty dialogue and entertaining banter between stars John Cena and Idris Elba. The action set pieces, also, are very funny; the director, Ilya Naishuller, previously made 2021’s Nobody, and knows his way around the intersection of action and comedy.
Heads of State is built around a high concept from the mid-1990s: Cena is Will Derringer, the newly-elected president of the United States who, shades of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was propelled to political office on the strength of his former career as an action movie star. Not any stranger, I suppose, than the political origin stories of Reagan, Trump, or the actor-turned-president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Elba’s Sam Clarke, the prime minister of Great Britain, who rose up to the political ranks after a career in the Army. So this odd couple relationship, right off the bat, has a great dynamic: The president’s a fake badass, while the prime minister is a real one.
Air Force One is hijacked with both world leaders on it, they wind up in a real-life action movie situation, having to fight their way across Europe to a crucial NATO summit, with the help of a British spy (Priyanka Chopra) who has some romantic history with the prime minister. Along the way, there are plane crashes, car crashes and a fistfight with some techno-loving sheep farmers in Belarus.
The main bad guys, led by Russian arms dealer/terrorist Paddy Considine, are a combination of an international arms syndicate and Wikileaks, engaging in assassinations as well as leaking embarrassing information about world leaders, with the ultimate goal of destroying NATO. Stephen Root steals a couple of scenes as the group’s resident computer hacker, as does Jack Quaid as a CIA man who helps out the president and prime minister at a safe house.
Cena’s very good at comedy, while Elba’s less of a natural, as anyone who remembers his brief stint on The Office can attest. But the two, who were co-stars in one of the Suicide Squad films, have a strong, easy chemistry together. Cena, it’s worth noting, looks a lot more impressive in the fight scenes than he has during his recent return to the pro wrestling ring.
The film doesn’t indicate which political party either leader belongs to, with the single clue that the vice president (Carla Gugino) seems to have some Trump-adjacent views when it comes to the utility of the NATO alliance. At least the script mentions, in passing, that as prime minister of the U.K., Elba’s character isn’t, in fact, a head of state (the king is the head of state).
While it landed directly on Prime Video on July 2, I saw Heads of State at a preview screening with an audience, for which it played well. I’m wondering why it didn’t get a shot in theaters, especially since, considering some of those effects sequences, it must’ve been expensive.