Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-04-13 (Sunday)

On Apr 14, 2025 at 1:45:51 PM PDT, "Arthur Lipscomb"
<arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

I watched:
 
G20 (Amazon streaming) Viola Davis stars as the President of the United
States who is attending a G20 summit in South Africa when terrorist
(lead by Anthony Starr) take the world leaders hostage. Among the
hostages are Davis' husband (Anthony Anderson) and two teenage children.
Davis and a few others manage to escape. Davis, in addition to being
the president, also happens to be a former soldier, and she intends to
use her military training to rescue her family and the other world
leaders from the hostage takers. This is basically Air Force One set in
a luxury hotel. It's an OK turn your brain off and enjoy the ride
action movie.

I watched this last night and it was pretty much what I expected. They should
have titled the movie "That's Not How This Works. It's Not How Any of This
Works!"

The entire plot hinges on the U.S. government hiring a private security
company-- a foreign one, no less-- to provide security for the entire shindig.
The only USSS agents present are the PPD shift. Everyone else is a private
contractor and the bad guys' entire plot depends on this being the case.

No, no, no, no, no.

No.

And in the opening scene, where the president is woken in the middle of the
night to address "the capture" of what at first seems to be some high-value
target, but in reality turns out to be the president's teen daughter who
slipped her detail and went bar-hopping, why in the name of god were the
director of the FBI, the CIA, and several generals and admirals (the Joint
Chiefs, one assumes) all lined up in the Oval when the daughter was brought in
to face her mother?

And this is in the middle of the night, remember, so all of these high-level
government officials were presumably woken out of sound sleep, showered,
dressed, put on uniforms, driven from their homes to the White House, etc.,
all so they could stand around silently while the president yelled at her
wayward daughter? Why was any of this happening in the Oval Office in the
first place?

Ugh.