「经济学人」Captainess America

It is outlandish in more ways than intended

The president of the United States, Danielle Sutton, has a plan to end world hunger. Played by Viola Davis, she flies to a G20 summit in South Africa to persuade other leaders to sign up. A gang of extortionists takes the bigwigs hostage, using their voices in deepfake videos for a vast cryptocurrency heist. Amid the mayhem President Sutton, an Iraq-war veteran, fights back, rescuing the captives and the global economy.

Whoever dreamed up “G20”, a rollicking action film out on Amazon Prime Video on April 10th, knew that bits of it were outlandish. After all, it has been a while since a president shot, thwacked or throttled baddies. Joltingly, though, parts of the plot that in the past would have seemed bland suddenly look fanciful. Inadvertently, the film measures the widening gap between a classic idea of America and the new reality.

A black woman serving as president is one of the more plausible elements. Before last November’s presidential election, it must have appeared to the producers that life might mimic their art; American voters decided otherwise. In the movie President Sutton brings her sassy teenage children along for the ride and worries about her parenting—a distraction that fictional male presidents tend to be spared while saving the world.

But another basic premise of the story—her attendance at the summit—now seems speculative too. As it happens, there really was a G20 pow-wow in South Africa in February (for foreign ministers, not leaders). Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, complained that the host country was “using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality & sustainability’. In other words: DEI and climate change”. He didn’t turn up.

Even without the stunts and explosions, A-list summits lend themselves to drama: the high stakes, the mammoth egos, the ticking clock. In “G20” President Sutton is no pushover. “If they want to remain allies,” she says of countries she means to cajole, “they have to fall in line.” All the same, her approach to diplomacy is distinctly collegial. She and her aides bandy about terms such as “co-operation” and “consensus” approvingly.

Coming from an American president, these days that argot sounds quaint. By contrast, the criminals’ rhetoric is uncomfortably contemporary. They spout paranoid conspiracy theories (and sport the hipsterish beards that seem as de rigueur for screen gunmen as for bartenders). One claims Sutton betrayed her country “when she decided farmers in Africa were more important than Americans”.

The film’s bedrock assumption is that America is the good guy. Rather than shaking down the fearful leaders for minerals deals, Sutton risks her life for them. The group includes the buffoonish British prime minister, nicely played by Douglas Hodge (making a getaway in her armoured car, he whines that the steering wheel is on the wrong side). “An evening spent following your president”, he says to an American, “has left me optimistic.”

You can tell a lot about a culture from the leaders it elects—and from the leaders it invents. Movies and TV shows that depict fictional American presidents are often distorted mirrors of their eras, reflecting their politics and neuroses. Sometimes the commander-in-chief is dastardly (as in “House of Cards”), lecherous (“Primary Colours”) or bumbling (“Dr Strangelove”). More often he, and sometimes she, is impossibly heroic, fending off nuclear strikes, alien invasions or apocalyptic comets.

The unusual aspect of “G20” is not that its heroine is a fantasy. So was Harrison Ford’s president in “Air Force One”, another post-cold-war adventure that enlists rogue states or terrorists as foes. The striking thing is that, for all the talk of crypto and artificial intelligence, the fantasy is a relic of a bygone age.

The America on show is brash, glamorous, generous and brave. This is a version of Uncle Sam that generations of audiences at home and abroad wanted to believe in. European admiration for American swagger runs back through the arrival of GIs in the second world war to early Hollywood; at a publicity screening of “G20” in London, ushers dressed as Secret Service agents evoked the old thrill of Americana. As the film attests, that ideal hasn’t quite expired.

But today it feels like an afterglow. For viewers who cherish it, “G20” may leave a mixed impression. It is a blast and a laugh, full of punch-ups, shoot-outs and winking humour. Ms Davis makes a smashing president. Yet it is also oddly melancholy: haunted by something precious being lost.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Captainess America”(Apr 10th 2025)

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