Heads of State isn’t the first 2025 film to feature a fictitious U.S. president transformed into an action hero to save lives, starting with their own. It isn’t even the first such 2025 film released on Amazon Prime. It isn’t even the first 2025 film released on Amazon Prime with a fictitious U.S. president that also has a fictitious UK prime minster. G20 got there first in all three instances.

However, it is the first 2025 film released on Amazon Prime with a fictitious U.S. president where that fictitious UK prime minister is played by Idris Elba. Advantage: Heads of State.

Ilya Naishuller’s film also features John Cena as that fictitious U.S. president, an action star playing a president both in real life and in the film. Elba’s Sam Clarke doesn’t like Cena’s Will Derringer because he thinks the star of the popular Water Cobra film franchise did not earn his role through public service, whereas Clarke served in the British Army and worked his way up through parliament. Derringer resents him right back due to a fish ‘n chips photo op between Clarke and Derringer’s opponent during the last election.

They’ve agreed to make nice and show solidarity at a time when NATO is facing an existential challenge from its own member states. This involves another photo op, a flight to the NATO summit aboard Air Force One, where the U.S. head of state will host the British one.

Russian arms dealer Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine) has other ideas – or rather, has the idea to take down Air Force One in flight, the leaders’ geographical confluence at 30,000 feet giving him the opportunity he needs. The world leaders parachute to safety – well, as safe as you can get when landing behind enemy lines, of sorts, in Belarus – while the world presumes them dead, leading vice president Elizabeth Kirk (Carla Gugino) to be sworn in in Derringer’s stead.

Two of the most recognisable men in the world up against hostile combatants, both those that tried to kill them and the locals in their new host country, might not have much of a chance, if they didn’t each have some combat experience, simulated or otherwise. Of course, an MI6 agent who once had a relationship with Clarke, played by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, may also be the key to surviving all this and preventing the dissolution of NATO.

Air Force One in peril movies involving fisticuffs from the U.S. president have a history dating all the way back to Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One in 1997, and probably before then, though that one did seem novel at the time. We don’t get a lot in Heads of State that hasn’t been imagined similarly at some point in the three decades since then, as evidenced by the previously mentioned fact that this is already the second of these this year, with Viola Davis doing plenty of justice to the ass-kicking president in the otherwise mediocre G20.

Heads of State is also pretty mediocre in many respects, but it does benefit from an inspired oil-and-water buddy comedy pairing of Elba and Cena, both of whom are capable of being really funny, neither of whom truly gets a chance to shine in that regard here. Heads of State has a light enough tone, but it makes what is usually the right decision to have this unfold as a series of action set pieces rather than comedy set pieces. The two leaders riding in a Belarusan truck with a bunch of sheep is about as close as the movie comes to humiliating them for the purposes of humour. Until things get ridiculous at the end, the action set pieces leading up to the finale are relatively understated, trying, for a time at least, to stay on the right side of plausibility.

Do you ever actually believe these two are world leaders? Not really, but maybe it doesn’t matter. They are believable world leader types, as the States in particular seem likely to elect an actor U.S. president in the near future; Cena’s fellow wrestler-turned-actor, Dwayne Johnson, even made an Amazon series called Young Rock, in which real reflections on his formative years are mixed with a framing story in which he’s running for president in 2032.

Naishuller has made this sort of action movie his calling card with his previous two films, Hardcore Henry and Nobody. Heads of State is the closest he’s come to an unqualified success, though not close enough to really distinguish it from the hordes of similar action comedies released on streamers in 2025. There are some clever shots and cleverly edited bits, and the actors do play well off one another.

If you do want to get beyond the surface level of Heads of State, there are some opportunities for introspection about how both Britain and the U.S. do on the world stage, which underscores their differing approaches and effectualities. Clarke criticises Dellinger for being provincial, as Dellinger himself admits he didn’t leave the United States for the first time until he was 28. Dellinger criticises Clarke for the British slogan “Keep calm and carry on,” which he summarises as “do nothing and then continue to do nothing.”

If this messy world ever has any hope of becoming more manageable, it’s pretty clear it will rely on traditional standard bearers like these two countries, and like NATO, to lead the way. You as the viewer, though, can just enjoy this escapist version of the world’s problems to distract yourself from the real version.

 

Heads of State is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.