Heads of State

Rated PG-13 • Prime Video

If you fancy Donald Trump strapped up like Rambo, squeezing off 200 armor-piercing rounds a minute from his M60—blap! blap! blap! blap!—forget it: Commanders-in-chief don’t do that kind of thing (anymore).

You’ll have to settle for Heads of State, a new Amazon Prime original about an American president and a British prime minister who get locked and loaded to fight off Russian bad guys.

Heads of State would’ve been a theatrical summer blockbuster before the click-a-flick revolution. Still, it has enjoyed a run as Prime’s No. 1 film globally—for good reason.

Sharp camerawork amps the vigorous action sequences (passengers barrel-roll from floor to wall to ceiling in a nose-diving airplane), plot twists careen throughout the storyline, and the snappy dialogue unloads numerous quotables. But violence and bad language are pervasive: The film fires off as many expletives as one-liners.

Affable President Will Derringer (John Cena) and dour Prime Minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba) don’t like each other. Their backgrounds are as different as their personalities: Clarke was once a special forces operative, and Derringer played one in the movies.

When a high-tech attack by Russian arms dealer Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine) puts Derringer and Clarke on the run together through rural Europe, the two heads of state must set aside petty squabbles to combat their murderous pursuers. Help comes from Clarke’s old flame and MI6 colleague Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas). The film’s serious moments spotlight the self-sacrifice of Secret Service personnel.

Heads of State surely traces its cinematic lineage back to White House–disaster classic Olympus Has Fallen and to 48 Hours, the grandfather of the modern odd-couple action-­comedy film. Cena and Elba play so well off each other, I can see them getting “reelected” for a sequel.