Just months after Viola Davis played a gun-toting US president saving the day at a G20 summit, along comes another “stupendously idiotic yet eminently watchable” action-buddy movie with a top-tier geopolitical setting, said Kevin Maher in The Times.
This time, the “bickering protagonists” are the leaders of the US and the UK: President Will Derringer (John Cena), a crass populist and former Hollywood action-movie star; and British PM Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), a “cautious, rule-abiding politician” who is suffering “a conspicuous, Starmer-like slump in the polls”.
The pair’s relationship is initially antagonistic, but when the presidential plane they are travelling on to a Nato summit is attacked by terrorists, forcing them to bail out over Belarus, they start working together – “snapping necks, machine-gunning faceless henchmen and leaping from exploding helicopters” as they go.
The early scenes are a bit awkward, said Olly Richards in Empire. But when Clarke and Derringer get stranded in a hostile country teeming with baddies, the film takes off. Clarke, an SAS veteran, proves a “competent survivalist”, but Derringer discovers that his Hollywood action credentials don’t mean much in real life.
Things become ever more daft as the film progresses, culminating in a “truly bonkers car chase that tests the boundaries of logic, physics and the feasible athleticism of middle-aged men”.
The cast deliver handsomely, said Andrew Lawrence in The Guardian. Elba and Cena have proper odd-couple chemistry, and there’s a nice turn from Priyanka Chopra as an MI6 agent. It’s all “fun, fiery and totally frivolous” – in short, “a perfect summer movie”.
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John Cena and Idris Elba have odd-couple chemistry as the US president and British prime minister
