Madam President Viola Davis

G20 is a perfect movie, in the sense that it was made specifically to appeal to me and my heart's most personal desires.

Seven minutes into G20, Viola Davis picks up a man, lifts him over her head, flips him in the air like some pizza dough, and body slams him back to the ground. He gurgles and grunts and wheezes something like, "Dang, Madame President!" while she pats his wittle cheeks, gratified with her morning workout on the White House lawn. She then takes her biceps to the Oval Office, keeping them on full and proud display in a sleeveless silk blouse, until a hateful assistant forces her to put on a blazer.

Which is to say that G20 is a perfect movie, in the sense that it was made specifically to appeal to me and my heart's most personal desires.

G20 doesn't have much of a "plot" to speak of, and the part of it that qualifies as "plot" is preposterous. However, the "plot" of Die Hard is "Bruce Willis escapes from a building" and the "plot" of First Blood is "Sylvester Stallone escapes from a building (jail)" and, while The Last of Us is way too body horror for me, I do believe that the plot of both the video game and the TV show is "being sad and gay in between escaping from buildings" so I really don't want to hear any grumbling about it.

It goes like this: Viola Davis is President Viola Davis. When the G20 Summit she's attending in South Africa gets attacked by crypto bro terrorists, she spends two hours ripping her sleeveless red caped cocktail dress shorter and shorter while running around in a hotel full of hostages, which includes her husband and two children, thrashing the hell out of giant men. At the beginning of the third act, she loots a pair of camo pants off one of the fellas whose ass she kicked. She shoves what's left of her dress into the waistband, shrugs on a flak jacket, and then continues on with wrecking every dude who steps in her way. The camera does a lot of slow-mo once she's in this outfit, which is correct.

President Viola Davis' children are in attendance at G20 because her teenage daughter, Serena (Marsai Martin, who is reunited here with Anthony Anderson, her dad from Black-ish), is a gamer and a hacker and she keeps escaping from her Secret Service detail. President Viola Davis doesn't trust Serena to not do even more hijinks in her absence, so she brings her along, which pretty much saves the entire world because: a) Serena's been practicing sneaking past men wearing suits and carrying guns for her entire tenure as First Daughter, and b) hackers in movies can do literally anything when they get their hands on something that has glowing buttons. Serena is, as they say, made for this moment. Demetrius is just a sweet little brother who covers for his sister’s shenanigans but also worries for her.

Now, let us talk about the various ways President Viola Davis stomps men in G20. I'm worried I made it sound like she spends the whole time running from them, and that is not the case. For starters, when she's escaping the first room, she goes full Terminator, talking about, "If you want to live, you'll follow my lead!" to two other women, one squidgy British guy, and her own security detail. Head-on, she kicks and punches and leg sweeps and choke-holds and does various other melee combat maneuvers.

At one point, she jumps, unarmed, down into an elevator full of bad guys, like freaking Captain America, and uses their own weapons to pummel them. When she sees six "low value" hostages in the food prep area, she's like, "I'll be saving them next." And her security guy goes, "We can't save everyone." And she says, "But we can save the people in the kitchen." For that one, she uses a cast iron skillet to whack a crypto bro in the face. (She electrocutes the other one.) Hand gun? Check. Machine gun? Check. Cookery knives and assassin knives? Check, check. One of the more relatable moments of G20 is when one of the guys she's fighting reaches around and grips her deltoid and passes out right there on the spot. Who among us is emotionally strong enough to handle the rush of clutching at Viola Davis' muscles like that? Certainly not me.

Two of the people she saves from the kitchens turn out to be good guy undercover fighters. One of them is Noxolo Dlamini as Lesedi. She's got a little bit of a Dora Milaje vibe, and when she rescues the kids by leaping onto a bad guy's shoulders and breaking his neck with her thighs, Demetrius goes, "Holy shit, you're from Wakanda?" Lesedi laughs like, "Kinda."

Our Madam President is wearing sneakers this whole time, by the way. Her stylist tried to put her in heels, but I think maybe Viola Davis is tired of seeing all those Annalise Keating high-heel clomping TikToks, so she's got red sneakers to match her red dress. I do think they should have put her in the Kobe 6 Reverse Grinch, but these look more like Skechers. Really the film's only miss.

At first, you think the Big Bad is Antony Starr, that guy from The Boys who always makes me think about Poppy in Mythic Quest going, "You can't swing a stick in Australia without hitting a Hemsworth!" But actually, the Big Bad is President Viola Davis' Treasury Secretary, this white woman who lost in the Democratic primary to President Viola Davis and has been having a complete and total secret entitled temper tantrum about it ever since. She goes on and on about how the job was HERS! It was HERS! She DESERVED it! And Viola Davis STOLE it! Her whole villain speech stinks of DEI dog-whistling. You can tell she's the type of person that if you told her white folks make up 43% of the workforce but a whopping 95% of senior management positions, or that 40% of middle management positions are taken up by white women while only 5% are Black women, she would go, "I have had to scratch and claw my way to every success" like that makes racism not real.

I love that the villain of G20 is a liberal white woman. It's perfect. She didn't get what she felt like she deserved and so she's going to crash the global economy about it. Sounds exactly right.

G20 isn't trying to be some kind of hard-hitting political commentary, but when you cast a 59-year-old Black woman as your action star, it becomes political because — well, our cultural failure to narratively consider the depth and breadth of Black women's experiences is a large part of why we're in this fascist mess right now.

I don’t care that this movie features dialogue such as “You need this Bitcoin for your plan to work!!!” while people toss around whatever a “crypto wallet” is. I don’t care that it includes exposition like “In a world where disinformation is more powerful than misinformation, this will look very damning!!!!” I don’t care that the White House situation room is watching someone’s IG live to keep track of this global catastrophe as it unfolds, or that President Viola Davis simply knows how to fly a helicopter, or even that the security at this place where the world’s 20 most powerful leaders have gathered consists of everyone wearing cruise ship-style color-coded wristbands.

I was thinking, as I was watching President Viola Davis kick ass for two hours, about Rebecca Traister's decade-old, still deeply relevant piece at New York magazine about why we humanize terrible real-life white men.

We live in a world made for and shaped around white men. And in aggregate, when the statues are of white men, the buildings and cities and bridges and schools are named after white men, the companies are run by white men and the movie stars are white men and the television shows are about white men and the celebrated authors are white men, the only humanity that is presented as comprehensible — the kind that succeeds and fails, that comprises strength and weakness, that feels love and anger and alienation and fear, that embodies nuance and contradiction, that can be heroic and villainous, abusive and gentle — is the humanity of white men. The repercussions of this kind of thinking? Well, maybe they explain some of what we see on the evening news.

G20 is buff, ruff-and-tumble President Viola Davis escaping from a hotel. But she starts in the Oval Office, exactly where she fucking belongs.