It’s time we call straight to streaming movies what they actually are: T.V. movies. They can dress themselves up as globetrotting action films with big stars punching terrorists and delivering one-liners but ultimately they are designed for the small screen. That’s not a knock on T.V. movies (anyone seen Duel?), it’s just an acknowledgement that these films have smaller budgets and don’t have the backing for a theatrical release for a reason.

 

That is to say that Ilya Naishuller’s latest film, Heads of State, exemplifies the streaming era. This film is a T.V. movie desperately trying to convince us it’s not. It will be forgotten in weeks, days, possibly even hours despite filling its cast with known names: John Cena, Idris Elba, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Paddy Considine, Stephen Root and Jack Quaid. Why? Because the suits at Amazon/MGM know this kind of boring personality-less shit doesn’t get people paying $25 a ticket.

 

The film opens with Noelle (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) pretending to be a news correspondent live reporting on the La Tomatina festival in Buñol. Y’know, the notorious biggest food fight in the world where people chuck tomatoes at one another. Well, just from the look of the tomatoes from my couch I could tell there wasn’t a single tomato on set (and this set, I can assure you, was far from Spain). Then Noelle contacts her special ops team through her earpiece and we get to hear the most cliche lines delivered by unimportant faces sitting in vans or hotel rooms looking at laptop screens.

 

At this point my eyes rolled back in my head and I realised it would be a long two hours. Which is disappointing for two reasons, (1) Naishuller’s previous film, Nobody, whilst not earth shattering, was a fun watch making the most of its small budget and premise and (2) this ridiculous premise had the potential to be fun.

 

I’ll start with the premise. It’s ludicrous, stupid, silly, and whatever other adjective you can think of. The British Prime Minister and the American President as buddy cops in an action film - it’d take a lot of contrivances and the surrendering of the audience to an asinine internal logic to work but in the right hands it certainly could. We were unfortunately not in the right hands.

 

Despite the premise there is nothing original to be seen. There’s car chases with machine gun fire, knife fights, fist fights, you name it, it’s got it. Are any well done? Nope, they’re all rushed and feel like after the take the director just shrugged and said, “good enough.” 

 

And the characters are even worse than the action. Every person is just a stereotype - Cena’s President is a loud arrogant American who cares more about his public image than actually helping people, Elba’s Prime Minister is up-tight and is invested in serving the people over looking good, Considine’s villain wants to destroy Nato for revenge over his dead son, Chopra Jones is a rough covert agent unwilling to commit to love, Stephen Root is a spectacled hacker who disagrees with the villain and on and on. The best example is when Cena and Elba (I won’t be using their character names because I forgot them as soon as the credits hit) run into some young Eastern European men. I wonder what they’d be doing? Oh I know, they’d be wearing tracksuits, listening to techno music and drinking vodka. No need to do a second draft guys!

 

If somehow you’re not convinced, let’s get to the music choices. Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, heard it? Ever seen it in an action film? Well, here it is again without any spark behind it. Kickstart My Heart, that’s never been used for a car chase right? Who’d think of such a bold choice? And how bout some irony for the final action beat, let’s play a love song, don’t think too hard, we’ll just use Can’t Help Falling in Love by Elvis. 

 

Get my point?

 

Back to reason one, Nobody has lots of fun and exciting action sequences with the bus fight as the real standout. That fight takes its time and punctuates every beat to make the audience feel the weight of every punch. Then it ends with Bob Odenkirk giving a guy a tracheotomy! That’s some memorable stuff. John Cena shooting a gun in a suit isn’t.

 

The whole thing is just lazy, almost as lazy as me watching this in my pyjamas. Don’t waste your time on it.

 

Lastly, making a film about the heads of the U.K. and U.S.A. spoiling a secret plot to break-up NATO is bound to have some political connotations. Like the rest of the film there wasn’t much thought put into these connotations and there really should’ve been. With Cena’s republican coded President and Elba’s Labor/Democrat coded Prime Minister learning from each other’s differences and meeting in the middle it is basically Aaron Sorkin’s endorsement of Mitt Romney put into three-act structure. Thumbs down.