G20: An engaging guilty pleasure

G20 (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for relentless violence

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Viola Davis isn’t the first Best Actress Oscar winner to turn into a kick-ass action hero — she was preceded by Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren and Jennifer Lawrence — but Davis definitely is the first EGOT to do so.

 

Secret Service Agent Manny Ruiz (Ramón Rodríguez) helps President Danielle Sutton
(Viola Davis) to safety, as South Korean First Lady Han Min-Seo (MeeWha Alana Lee)
wisely follows.

(She achieved that status in 2023, when she won a Grammy Award for narrating her memoir, Finding Me, as an audiobook.)

I’d also argue that, even in full-blown battle mode, Davis is the most regal of the bunch.

 

G20 is pure hokum, but director Patricia Riggen and editors Doc Crotzer and Emma E. Hickox keep things moving rapidly enough to camouflage a plot that has more holes than the proverbial Swiss cheese. Honestly, the four credited scripters — Logan Miller, Noah Miller, Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss — could have tried a little harder.

 

(I also get a sense — given that production on this film took place in early 2024 — that all concerned envisioned this as wishful thinking about the upcoming real-world election, and cheekily built their story around a Black female U.S. president.

 

(Ah, if only...)

 

We’re introduced to President Danielle Sutton (Davis) as she’s dragged out of bed late one night, because her headstrong teenage daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) once again evaded her Secret Service handlers to sneak out of the White House. 

 

Thoroughly fed up — because the girl refuses to realize how such behavior places her in danger — Sutton and her husband, Derek (Anthony Anderson), decide to take Serena and her brother Demetrius (Christopher Farrar) to Cape Town, site of the annual G20 summit meeting, in order to keep her under strict surveillance.

 

This soon will place Serena and Demetrius in far greater danger than her midnight escapades, because...

 

...Summit security has been outsourced to a private outfit.

 

(“Stupid mistake!” we scream.)

Megan Leavey: A doggone good tale

Megan Leavey (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for war violence, dramatic intensity and mild profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.9.17

Next time my parents grouse that movies aren’t like they used to be, I’ll point them toward this one.

Newly deployed in Fallujah, Iraq, Cpl. Megan Leavey (Kate Mara) and her explosives-
sniffing dog, Rex, are assigned to detect the improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
hidden in and alongside the road on which their vehicles need to travel.

Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Megan Leavey is a straight-ahead drama with plenty of heart, told in the uncomplicated manner that marked family-friendly movies back in the day ... and I mean that as a compliment. Scripters Pamela Gray, Annie Mumolo and Tim Lovestedt tell this story efficiently and poignantly, without needless emotional angst, and Cowperthwaite ensures that the narrative doesn’t slide into manipulative bathos.

Best of all, this is a true story: one likely to be remembered by those who followed the saga’s final chapter in 2012. While events have been compressed — as often is the case, with big-screen adaptations — Cowperthwaite and her collaborators hit the essential high points; the result is a thoroughly engaging and deeply poignant drama. And if you’re not moved by the final scene, you’re truly made of stone.

On a sidebar note, it also marks a solid star turn by Kate Mara, who has spent the last decade impressing TV viewers with memorable supporting roles in 24, American Horror Story and House of Cards. She hasn’t been as lucky with big-screen work — and probably wishes that 2015’s Fantastic Four hadn’t happened — but this new film should enhance her profile, and deservedly so.

Her Megan Leavey is introduced here in 2003, as an aimless, desperately unhappy 20-year-old New Yorker taking up space in her bedroom. Her mother, Jackie (Edie Falco), has become disgusted by this daughter who, we can assume, probably has been a nightmare child for many years. Then again, Jackie is no prize; Falco makes her such a believably horrid shrike that Leavey’s actual mother might have grounds for character assassination.

At low ebb and with no other plans, Megan impulsively joins the Marines, surviving boot camp and subsequently attending military police school at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton. But her “wild child” tendencies haven’t quite been eradicated; an ill-advised night of misbehavior results in a week of scut detail in the camp’s kennel unit ... and the promise of a dishonorable discharge, if she screws up one more time.

Not to worry. Megan is immediately fascinated by the K9 unit, and particularly by a massive, apparently unruly German shepherd named Rex. Gaining permission to have anything to do with this dog, however, means buckling down in all sorts of ways, before the K9 unit’s gruff Sgt. Gunny Martin (Common) will give her even a second glance.