Adventures in Streaming: When the president becomes an action figure
In 1997, Harrison Ford uttered that line to Russian terrorist Gary Oldman in the Wolfgang Peterson movie Air Force One (streaming on Paramount+). It didn't seem a culturally pivotal moment at the time, but it apparently opened some sort of pipeline wherein U.S. presidents would become action heroes in films as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and Olympus Has Fallen.
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Prime Video is currently streaming two different variations of the formula (which, let's face it, was created in a Hollywood lab utilizing Die Hard as the agar in the petri dish).
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Heads of State stars John Cena as Will Derringer, a newly elected American president, leaping into the White House after a career as a movie action hero. (One can only feel nostalgia toward the 2006 satire Idiocracy which portrayed that notion as ridiculously far-fetched.)
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His feel-good presidency goes wrong when a vengeful Russian terrorist (Paddy Considine), launches an assault on an Air Force One mission to Europe for a NATO conference, with the British Prime Minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), caught up in the crossfire. Clarke is ex-military and, once the two leaders parachute to safety, he is given to mocking Derringer's pretend fighting experience. If their spark-striking conflict seems familiar, Cena and Elba shared an even more deadly enmity in The Suicide Squad.
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The film is helmed by Ilya Naishuller, the Russian director who made Hardcore Henry and the Bob Odenkirk actionfest Nobody. Naishuller is skilled at live-action cartoons, but when the stakes are raised, that makes for some tonal needle scratches as we go from mass murder on Air Force One to Cena being smacked in the face with sheep udders as he and Elba are smuggled out of Belarus on a livestock truck. Waiting in the wings to confuse things even further is Priyanka Chopra Jonas, in John Wick mode, playing Noelle, Sam's love interest and saviour.
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With its relentless action beats, and it's road-movie squabbling, it's mostly silly, disposable stuff. But you have to admit, it's certainly an interesting time for a Russian filmmaker to make an American action movie with a Russian villain in cahoots with a would-be American demagogue plotting to destroy the NATO alliance.
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