Film: Heads of State
Cast: Idris Elba, John Cena, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Carla Gugino, Jack Quaid, Stephen Root, Sarah Niles, Richard Coyle, Paddy Considine
Director: Ilya Naishuller
Rating: 3/5
Runtime: 113 min

This third feature film by director Ilya Naishuller, is a typical star powered action-comedy. In an unexpected casting choice, we have John Cena as the American president and Idris Elba as the British prime minister. But that’s all that is really different from the regular Hollywood actioner. The film also features Priyanka Chopra Jonas as a TV news reporter, Paddy Considine as an arms dealer Viktor Gradow, Stephen Root as his henchman Arthur Hammond, Jack Quaid as a comical CIA station chief  Marty Comer, and Carla Gugino as the vice president.

The film opens with television journalist, Noel Bisset(Priyanka Chopra Jonas), actually an MI6 agent on a joint operation with the CIA, getting involved in a massive food fight in Spain, at the annual La Tomatina festival. Thereafter she is presumed dead and we don’t see her for much of the film until she returns in spectacular fashion for the set-piece action finale where the Heads of State duo work together alongside the M16 agent to thwart a global conspiracy that threatens the world.

Will Derringer(Cena) won his Presidency with the campaign promise, “We did it at the box office and now we’ll do it in the Oval Office.”  Like Ronald Reagan he was a movie star but he also had a hit franchise ‘Water Cobra’ behind his success. Derringer is a likeable family man and earnest in his attempt to do good but he finds himself in way over his head as the president. Sam Clarke (Elba) is Cambridge-educated, ex miltary man, has been prime minister for six years and is currently contending with voter dissatisfaction. He scorns the president for his tendency to go rogue. And as is typical, Derringer does just that at a joint press conference when he stops off in London on the way to a NATO meeting.