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Some actors, there’s a clear distinction between their character-actor phases and their leading-role phases, or between their TV, movie, and stage careers. Those lines did once exist for Viola Davis, who spent a solid ten years playing parts that were sometimes memorable (as in her pop-ins for Steven Soderbergh, evidently an early fan) and sometimes unnamed (“policewoman,” “mother in hospital,” etc.). But sometime around the time that she completed her EGOT – the winning of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony – Davis erased any distinctions between which phase of her career she was in. She was in all of them, all at once, a particularly EGOT-y EGOT. Her Emmy was for a starring role on How to Get Away with Murder, a hit show that was on the air for six years. During that run, she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Fences, in a part that also won her a Tony (though that was her second of the latter); she’s been nominated for three other Oscars, too. She’s been in superhero movies and Hunger Games and August Wilson adaptations. She played First Lady Michelle Obama for television; now she’s playing the president, albeit a fictional one, in the Prime Video action movie G20, which is basically Air Force One at the G20 summit rather than on an airplane. (Which means it’s also a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-Die Hard.)
It’s tempting to characterize her latest movie as Neesoning – a prestige performer changing things up by indulging in the kind of ass-kicking you may have seen in their eyes or heard in the gravity of their voice, but not actually seen applied to pretend bad guys before. But Liam Neeson’s career has very much been one of phases: leading man; supporting actor/wise mentor; action star. Before G20, Davis’s most recent gigs were voiceover parts in Kung Fu Panda 4 and Max’s animated series Creature Commandos, for which her Amanda Waller (first seen in Suicide Squad) became one of the only figures from the previous iteration of the DC movie universe to carry over in a reboot. In other words, she’s like Dame Judi Dench in the Bond movie switch-off from Pierce Brosnan to Daniel Craig: Different continuity, whole different deal, but what are you going to do? Recast Viola Davis?
That’s all to say that Davis doesn’t seem to be desperate for work, despite her willingness to lend her voice to a second-string DC streaming cartoon. Then again, she’s also a Black woman who’s been in the movie business for three decades, so she’s probably acutely aware of how difficult it can get.
Though G20 seems like a pretty standard gear-shift, recalling not just Neeson but other prestige-plus-charisma figures like Harrison Ford or (circa The River Wild) Meryl Streep, it’s also indicative of Davis’s uniquely all-at-once career. President Danielle Sutton is an aspirational role; we’ve never had a woman president before, let alone a Black woman, and though it’s become standard for movies to imagine a next step not yet taken – Morgan Freeman was a movie president long before Barack Obama was real one – the fraught nature of the presidency means that Davis in that role isn’t just representation. It puts her in that Harrison Ford/Air Force One position of creating a pointed contrast whether or not it’s intended: Boy, wouldn’t it be great if this was the real thing? It’s entirely coincidental but still notable that the bad guys in G20 are intent on tanking the world’s economies in order to enrich themselves. President Viola gives them what-for.
Unfortunately, G20 isn’t potent enough to sustain the fantasy – not least because in a hilarious, classic instance of clunky Hollywood equivocation, her character is assigned the ludicrous goal of curing global hunger through cryptocurrency. This is where the encompassing nature of Davis’s career comes back to bite her: Though it gives her a plum movie-star showcase, the movie itself is also low-rent shlock, with badly directed action sequences and a kind of generic, apolitical steeliness that feels more like an insult to the audience than a compliment to Davis.
It’s a shame, because she can ride that line between seriousness and glamorousness effortlessly. President Sutton fusses a little about being made to wear a sleek red dress for the big economic summit, but acquiesces, pulls it off – and hides red sneakers underneath, which turn out to be just the thing for a bunch of running, kicking, and punching through your basic Die Hard scenario. But apart from that cute bit of business, the movie doesn’t have much fun with the line between political decorum and Getting Things Done (apart from the valid presumption that maybe a military career might still be the strongest path toward the country accepting a woman as president). In a strange way, Davis’s Amanda Waller, the grimly amoral boss of the Suicide Squad over in DC world, is the more compelling use of her talents. It’s still cartoon nonsense, but at least it knows it’s cartoon nonsense. It’s hard to picture Amanda Waller suggesting sub-Saharan Africa should turn to crypto in their time of need, at least. The good thing about G20 is that it’s over and done with, and while Davis will almost certainly appear in another shlocky movie within a few years, it may not register on her way to whatever tops an EGOT (double EGOT? Adding a Pulitzer and a Daytime Emmy for DEEGOTP?), continuing to do it all.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
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