G20

The President of the United States is Daniella Sutton, and besides the geopolitical uphill battle and snooty news reporters, her teenage daughter is a nightmare. As the G20 summit gets underway, the tech-savvy 16-year-old has managed to hack the Pentagon's servers to expose a CIA spy, leaving her mother and President fuming. The punishment? The obstinate teenage daughter must accompany her mum to the G20 meeting in South Africa. This is where the world's 19 richest nations gather every year to talk economic progress and it's just about the most boring thing a rebellious 16-year-old rocker can imagine. Fuck you, mum! Raising children is hard, especially if you're the most powerful woman on the planet and simply don't have the time to reprimand a brat. It's a good thing that there are dirtbags who can help with that. It's just a shame that 39 people have to die before the chosen 16-year-old teenage rebel is frightened enough to calm down and check her stubborn attitude and behaviour.

G20 is pretty much exactly the same film as White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen, based on the same basic premise with the same type of characters, and the same sequence of events. All are more or less lousy offshoots of Die Hard and although I like Olympus Has Fallen, none of these films would be much if Gerard Butler wasn't involved somewhere.

President Daniella arrives in South Africa with her personal bodyguard, the Secret Service, and 12 Delta Force operatives. They think they're going to talk about a new international digital currency for a few days and then return home, but what they do not know is that a former Australian special forces soldier and toughened brutal freedom fighter known as Rutledge has infiltrated the meeting's security chain as a "consultant" and now intends to assassinate as many world leaders and top politicians as possible in order to overthrow the world order and return the power to the people. Libertad!

Ex spec ops operative Rutledge is portrayed by none other than Homelander himself, Anthony Starr, who here speaks in his native New Zealand tongue and swears like a sailor. He's unabashedly bloodthirsty and downright mean, which, together with Sutton, builds a conflict picture completely lacking grey areas or nuances. The characters are as thin as printer paper, flat as pancakes, and the dialogue is so predictably stupid that it often feels like a bad Saturday Night Live sketch. Viola Davies' president is supposed to be a veteran war hero but, after two terms in the White House, she has forgotten how to hold a gun (which quickly comes back to haunt her when her family is threatened by Australian terrorists with well-groomed beards)... Still, in one fell swoop, she has torn her presidential evening blouse, jumped into a bullet-proof vest, snagged a Glock, and started murdering terrorists. Nobody messes with the Suttons. Even her made-up super-imposed first husband starts swinging knockout punches in the film's second act, and it quickly becomes the funniest part of G20 because comedian Anthony Anderson clearly doesn't even know how to form a fist when he fights. It's incredibly liberating.

G20 is as stupid as it is ugly, the photography and set design looks like it was lifted from the last season of The Bachelor, and the script is ridiculously poor too. It would be tolerable if all the action was so Extraction-like and hard-hitting and brutal, but it isn't. Director Patricia Riggen (Dopesick) knows next to nothing about how to build decent action scenes and when that falls flat there's nothing left in G20 to use to raise the already low rating. It's rubbish. There's not much else left to say.