Picoreview: G20 – a great Die Hard movie
In this particular Die Hard movie, which appears to be an Amazon Prime original, John McClane is Viola Davis, President of the United States, Nakatomi Plaza is the G20 summit being held in South Africa, and the hostages are the leaders of the G20 nations.
Look, all I can tell you is that it delivers on what it promises. Viola Davis is fabulous and has magnificent biceps, her family dynamic feels real, and an older Asian woman has an unexpectedly great role. Is it keenly realistic? Obviously not, but it’s good fun. I’d have loved to have seen it in the cinema.
Picoreview: Heads of State – a perfectly serviceable buddy action-comedy
Another Amazon Prime original in which John Cena plays himself if he was elected President of the United States, and Idris Elba plays every Prime Minister of Britain ever if John Cena got elected as the President of the United States, and then terrorists tried to kill them.
Cena is charming, which I generally find him to be anyway, but the role kinda does him the favor of recognizing that John Cena is smart enough to know he’d be way the hell over his head if he got elected POTUS and works from there, and I liked the writing of it quite a lot. And Elba, of course, does NOT seem like the kind of person who would be in way over his head if he was elected PMOB (I mean, he no doubt would be, he’s an actor, not a politician, but he COMES ACROSS like somebody who would coolly handle it all), and the dynamic works pretty well. I’d have paid for this in the cinema, too.
It’s not as good as G20, but they’d make a great double feature. You just probably want to watch Heads of State first. :)