‘Heads of State’ Review: Ilya Naishuller’s First Miss
While Ilya Naishuller remains a cogent action artist who knows how to frame and shoot a succession of kinetically exciting sequences, everything around the action in his latest, ‘Heads of State’, falls incredibly flat.
It shouldn’t go by unnoticed that Ilya Naishuller is really great at staging action and possesses an eye that few of his contemporaries have. That’s why each action setpiece is the best part of his latest motion picture, Heads of State, what looks to be yet another fake, direct-to-streaming piece of “content” that feels more like something you’d see in a Saturday Night Live sketch than an actual movie. To its credit, though, the action keeps the plot moving and us semi-engaged, even if, this time around, Naishuller is limited by PG-13 constraints and can’t unleash the same thirst for blood-soaked violence he had in his groundbreaking directorial debut, Hardcore Henry, and his follow-up, Nobody.
While another action auteur is helming the sequel to Nobody (Timo Tjahjanto), Naishuller went on to make what could’ve been a fun piece of popcorn entertainment if it wasn’t restrained by a rating that doesn’t allow bloodletting and had an actual screenplay with well-rounded characters that didn’t feel written by artificial intelligence. It doesn’t help the movie’s case that, just a few months ago, Prime Video released a political action movie with similar beats, where the President of the United States (Viola Davis) had to use her particular set of skills to combat terrorists who held the G20 summit hostage, and that film, while well-mounted in its action, had an equally disposable plot.
In Heads of State, it is John Cena who plays the President, a former action movie star with zero political experience now the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation in the world. Hmmm, does it remind you of someone who is currently president? Surely, there will be a commentary on this occurring within its 114 minutes, right? There is, but don’t expect screenwriters Josh Applebaum, André Nemec and Harrison Query to dive deep into the political ramifications of such a change in the way Americans want diplomacy to be done now. Rather, you get a fairly mindless picture where President Will Derringer is encouraged to make allies, as most of the world’s politicians don’t take him seriously, and his approval ratings aren’t as strong as when he took office.
This includes UK Prime Minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), who believes President Derringer “still hasn’t figured out the difference between a press conference and a press junket,” and during a joint meeting with the two, thinks he lacks the experience needed to safeguard his country. However, in an effort to boost both leaders’ popularity, the President welcomes the Prime Minister inside Air Force One as they head to a NATO summit in Trieste, only for the plane to be attacked by a group of terrorists, led by ruthless criminal Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine, who seems to have a knack at playing bad people in 2025 released pieces of media, after MobLand and Deep Cover).
Presumed dead, the two must now put their differences aside and travel to the summit, before NATO is disbanded as a result of the plane’s explosion. They join forces with a revolving door of side protagonists, including CIA operative Marty Comer (Jack Quaid), and MI6 agent Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), who has been on Gradov’s trail for a while, with her last mission set to apprehend him leading to the assassination of her entire team.
From there, you can figure out exactly where the plot is leading towards, beat-for-beat, especially after it introduces all of its remaining moving pieces, including a power-hungry Vice President ready to put “America first” (played by Carla Gugino) and a hacker who seems to have buyer’s remorse for working hand-in-hand with Gradov (played by Stephen Root). And whenever Heads of State isn’t staging a large-scale action setpiece, the film falls pitifully flat on its face. The dialogues are unnaturally delivered and feel so distanced from what real human interaction sounds like that we can genuinely look away from the screen and not miss a single moment of the picture, since every line of dialogue spoken by the characters is a piece of exposition that was previously visualized in another scene, but is now re-explained so the audiences who were looking at their phones didn’t miss a single beat.
That’s the general viewing approach to most direct-to-streaming offering, because there isn’t an image of note that doesn’t differ from the countless other pieces of content that’s meant to be mindlessly consumed one evening and forgotten when you shut off your television and go to bed. At least this one has some solid alchemy between Cena and Elba, who genuinely seem to be having a blast riffing on each other and showcasing their action-movie skills in territories they’ve not explored yet. This is probably due to the fact that they’ve worked with each other before, in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, but their banter differs greatly from what was laid out between Bloodsport and Peacemaker. Cena, who is usually a commanding screen presence, has a more (purposefully) clumsy action style here than his typical blockbuster roles, putting him in an against-type situation that’s constantly funny and engaging, especially during a significant slapstick setpiece that immediately recalls the accidental coincidences of a Jackie Chan-directed sequence.
Paired with Elba, the two have a rapport that keeps the movie going, especially during these action scenes, where Naishuller does the most he can in amping up the violence and kineticism for a PG-13 audience. The fact that each action scene is tightly edited and energetically shot is to his credit, because a lesser filmmaker who has always worked in R-rated constraints would’ve hacked sequences like this to bits in the editing room. Naishuller is able to effectively adapt his style to the needs of the movie, even if he can’t save everything that isn’t an action scene. It’s incredible how Heads of State has little to no forward momentum when it stops dead in its tracks to set up its scenario or form a sense of chemistry between its three leads.
And while Cena and Elba are undoubtedly entertaining, Chopra comes across as the film’s weakest link, possessing little to no sense of palpable bond with the two leads, and feels like a tacked-on addition rather than an active part of the team. It’s a shame that her Hollywood career hasn’t led her to any tangible roles, even if she excels in this picture during a close, bare-knuckled, one-on-one fight sequence between one of Gradov’s henchmen and an extended setpiece as Noel and Will are stuck inside a mirrored vault. Away from the action, Chopra can’t make her character stand out, even if Naishuller gives her the most visually exciting sight gags to explain how she survived the attack on her team during the movie’s opening scene.
There’s hope that Chopra’s next role, in S.S. Rajamouli’s yet-to-be-titled Mahesh Babu project, will reinvigorate a career that has been sadly dead ever since she stepped away from Indian cinema to focus on American films. Her jump was successful, in the financial sense of the term, but we are far removed from the star-making performances she gave in Rakesh Roshan’s Krrish, Farhan Akhtar’s Don, and the one that was a significant turning point for her career, Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion. Quaid, on the other hand, doesn’t have it and feels, in this movie, as the literal personification of dead air, even during a fairly exciting setpiece through the sounds of the (overused) Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” It's incredible how his mere presence brings a movie down simply by attempting to be another variant of Ryan Reynolds. I’ve yet to see a good performance from him, but I am hopeful he can carve his own path away from the style of The Boys when that show reaches its end.
It's only Naishuller’s dexterity as an action artist that kept me encouraged to continue watching Heads of State, even if I would roll my head in disbelief whenever the film started to sag and attempted to invest me in a plot I cared little about, with a formal approach that feels as unimpressive as most direct-to-streaming offerings. Had Amazon let the Russian filmmaker fully cook and given him an R-rated vehicle, perhaps I would’ve enjoyed this disposable actioner more, because it might have felt like a proper movie, as opposed to the half-baked, fake-looking one we have. Still, in an era where most giant blockbusters don’t know how to shoot (and, most importantly, edit) action, Heads of State does serve as a good reminder that there are artists who know what they’re doing, if only they had a script that felt fresh to genuinely aid them this time around.