Heads of State (2025)

Heads of State arrives as a $150 million exercise in the belief that two large men shouting at each other across a tarmac constitutes foreign policy. John Cena plays a freshly elected American president who once made action movies, Idris Elba the British prime minister who cannot abide him, and the two spend the better part of two hours being shot at through Belarus, Poland, Croatia and Italy. Ilya Naishuller directs the chases with the same cheerful brutality he brought to Nobody, and the results are professionally competent. The picture is also, by the standards of its genre, unusually integrated: Elba and Cena headline, Priyanka Chopra Jonas runs the MI6 field work, and Carla Gugino schemes from the vice presidency. Nobody in the film mentions this. Nobody in the film mentions anything about it at all.

This is a picture that name-drops NATO, Five Eyes and a surveillance program called ECHELON the way a toddler names dinosaurs. There is no sermon about empire, no indictment of the arms trade despite the presence of an arms dealer, no environmental lament, no reckoning with race, though the plot drags its heroes through Belarus and Warsaw. The villains are foreign mercenaries and one treacherous vice president, which is to say the film's politics are those of a 1980s airport paperback. Chopra's agent is capable and Gugino's vice president is cunning, and neither fact is ever converted into an argument. The whole enterprise is glib, sunlit, and entirely unserious.

The film offers the reliable pleasure of watching two movie stars discover they like each other, which is not nothing. It is a competent, weightless diversion, and its cultural footprint amounts to a casting decision the screenplay never notices it has made. The final accounting is a faint trace of progressive sensibility in the ensemble and near silence everywhere else. I enjoyed it. I have already forgotten most of it.