'G20' review: Charismatic, compelling Viola Davis shows off her action-movie chops

WHAT IT'S ABOUT When it comes to elevator pitches, it would be tough to do better: "Air Force One" meets "Die Hard," with Viola Davis as the president, beating the heck out of the bad guys.

It's such an obvious hit that you have to wonder why it took so long to come to fruition. 

But we're here, in "G20," an old-school genre picture on Prime Video in which President Danielle Sutton (Davis), a veteran of the Iraq War, must save her fellow world leaders and her family after the G20 summit in Cape Town, South Africa, is taken over by terrorists.

MY SAY It will surprise no one to learn that Davis turns President Sutton into a compelling and charismatic figure, a powerful leader who is equally at home marshaling support for a geopolitical initiative that has become the talk of the summit (the details don't matter) and absolutely annihilating terrorists.

She is one of only a handful of actors to have won a competitive EGOT (an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony). And lets just go out on a limb here and say that John Gielgud and Audrey Hepburn, two of her EGOT counterparts, probably would've never starred in a movie like this.

The burden on director Patricia Riggen, the screenwriters and the rest of the team is to meet Davis on her level. If you're going to have one of the greatest actors of all time starring in your action movie, you'd better surround her with a screenplay and action scenes that justify her involvement.

The movie succeeds only intermittently on that front.

It's fun, most of the time, and it delivers the basic goods for audience members looking for a throwback to a style of filmmaking that's been mostly relegated to the past. 

But the writing could be crisper; the bad guys' plot stems around a ploy to use deepfakes of the world leaders to sink the world currency markets and profit over a surge in cryptocurrency (at least I think that's what they're doing, don't quote me on this). But it all ultimately revolves around the possession of the usual MacGuffin, in this case a crypto wallet.

There's some one-dimensional family drama that's added to humanize the Suttons. Anthony Anderson plays the first gentleman and Marsai Martin and Christopher Farrar play the kids. It brings little of interest to the story.

And if there were never again a scene of U.S. officials sitting around the Situation Room, or some other similar complex, and looking very concerned in front of a bunch of TV screens, that would be fine.

The same basic issues apply to the action sequences, which mostly revolve around quick camera movements and a bunch of close-ups, with very little broader perspective. When the movie lets Davis move cleanly through space and show off her physical chops, it works, but when it obfuscates things, the person doing the fighting almost doesn't matter.

BOTTOM LINE Viola Davis makes the movie worth watching for action genre fans, but there's untapped potential.