G20 | rated R | starring Viola Davis, Antony Starr, Ramon Rodriguez, Anthony Anderson, Elizabeth Marvel, Clark Gregg | directed by Patricia Riggen | 1 hr 48 mins | 1 out of 5 stars
Cleaner | rated R | starring Daisy Ridley, Clive Owen | directed by Martin Campbell | 1 hr 37 mins | 2 out of 5 stars |
2025 gave us not one, but two female-led, R-rated, Die Hard rip-off action movies where a woman with a considerable set of skills turns out to be in the wrong place at the right time when terrorists take over a skyscraper. G20 goes the Air Force One, ass-kicking president route with Viola Davis in the role of Commander and Chief Sutton at a G20 conference in Cape Town, South Africa who gets separated from the group as terrorists (lead by Antony Starr) take the rest of the world leaders hostage. President Sutton’s husband (Anthony Anderson) and daughter are there to give the movie a cheesy Roland Emmerich family vibe. Wouldn’t you know that Sutton’s daughter (Marsai Martin)’s pension for hacking White House security (confounding the nation’s top security experts) is going to come in handy against the terrorists?
Cleaner has lower stakes, lacking a room full of world leaders as hostages, but a bit of a higher concept. What if, during one of these hostage situations the building window cleaner were actually a trained ex-soldier who happens to witness the attack from a safe vantage point outside? How does she get in and stop them? I dug it. Daisy Ridley attempts to shake off Star Wars fans as a down-on-her-luck woman who cares for her brother and spends nights on a scaffold several hundred feet on the outside of a skyscraper when one night she catches a hostage situation led by villainous Clive Owen.
Suffice to say, neither movie takes full advantage of its premise. G20 lacks the high-stakes fun of pop-corn presidential action fluff like Air Force One, White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen – all of which are campy B-movies that achieve a bit of fun because they know how ridiculous they are. On the other hand, G20 is deadly serious about the plot, the threat, and about turning Davis into an action hero. Of the Die Hard rip-offs, this one is the most blatant, but it doesn’t stop there, retreading twists from the inside-job conspiracy plot of White House Down before it’s all over. It has to, doesn’t it. The villain has to come from within the US government, so nobody gets offended.
Cleaner similarly doesn’t know where to go. This movie should have doubled down on the dizzying heights of the scaffold setting, instead it finds a way for Ridley’s Joey to get in the building quickly and fight off the bad guys routinely. If expectations were a little higher for this one, it’s due to the involvement of Martin Campbell, the director who (twice!) brought back the Bond franchise with Goldeneye and the masterful modern classic Casino Royale. In the years since, Campbell hasn’t found a script to match his action movie pension and hit those heights. But he handles the action skillfully enough. Similarly, the Star Wars fans will never admit it, but Ridley is just fine in action hero mode here. Cleaner works a little better because it’s a leaner movie. It’s not going for the broad appeal G20 clearly is. Just look at the running times of both of them.
The biggest thing G20 and Cleaner have in common however, and this seems to be a new Hollywood trend, is that the villains are relatable. I don’t mean you feel for them because they have a tragic back story, I mean their objective in perpetuating the crime seems correct and unobjectionable. In G20 Antony Starr’s villain wants to alert the world to the dangers of digital currency, and how governments while pretending to roll them out for noble reasons, are using them make it easier to track our every move. Then he uses AI to show everyone the danger of AI by recording videos of the politicians and make them say anything he wants. I mean, yes, sounds like he’s got the right idea. On top of the fact, that the movie presents President Sutton as someone who gained popularity on a photo of her serving in Iraq the context of which was a complete lie withheld from the people. Check and check. Now I’m with him and against her. I’ve never rooted so strongly for the supposed villain before in my life. Giving such a sympathetic motive to the villain makes all of Davis’ action heroics all the more laughable.
Similarly, in Cleaner Clive Owen’s character is an environmentalist who storms the shareholder meeting of a company that proports to promote clean energy and is really engaging in environmental pollution, destruction and the wholesale murder of anyone who speaks out against them. So, check there too. Again, seems fairly reasonable. We’ve been saying Marvel movies have a villain problem for a decade, but most Hollywood movies have a villain problem. Now, yes, it’s a normal thing for studios to disguise their messages by putting them in the mouths of a villains’ monologue. Movies have been doing that forever. It’s a clever way of discussing something un-PC and kind of socially unacceptable by putting it in the mouth of a character you’ve established to be a killer or a lunatic and can get away with it. All great villain monologues have a grain or a pound of truth in them. That’s what makes the satire work. That’s where the screenwriter’s real feelings are hidden without beating us over the head with them.
But we don’t have clever screenwriters anymore. We have people that grew up on Disney villain origin stories and want to write about themselves and the issues they want you to know they care about. This is colliding with several writing rules and are being misplaced and misused. One, that your villain has to be the hero in his own mind and, two, that they have to be relatable in some way. Pile that on the fact that nobody here wants to offend anyone, limiting villain motive options to a small and select group of things – and Bang – you’ve got bad guys going up against other bad guys. Bad guys who are going up against corruption that is so big and institutional that what would have seemed like radical over-the-top measures (like kidnapping the G20 conference) in the past now don’t seem so radical and over-the-top.
Maybe it’s Hollywood trying to keep the image of a failing system afloat or maybe it’s psychotic young scriptwriters who see themselves as revolutionaries and sympathize with the bad guy anyway, but regardless, it’s here and it’s real. We have a villain problem. Villains that aren’t evil or scary. And for every Thanos or Art the Clown we can put a hundred more up that show those are just the exceptions that prove the rule.