Heads of State (2025)

Heads of State (2025)

7/10

Starring           

Idris Elba

John Cena

Priyanka Chopra

Carla Gugino

Jack Quaid

 

Directed by Ilya Naishuller

The movie does start in a very interesting way, with a combined operative work that went south in Spain. People are dead from both sides (U.S. and U.K), and the two leaders have to stand in front of a press conference and see how they can manage the situation.

The movie is about two leaders, the President of the U.S. and the Prime Minister of Britain, played by John Cena and Idris Elba respectively. Cena’s character, Will Derringer, is a former action movie star who finds his way into politics and is kind of learning the gig as time goes along. Sam Clarke, on the other hand (Elba), is a career politician who has served before and does not like Will but still has to deal with him.

The chemistry between these two actors, I was surprised, was amazing. The way they played off each other in their dialogue and how they managed to take some serious conversations and turn it into a silly argument is actually fun to see and enjoyable.

The movie does take some liberty in the way Air Force One was taken down. Even I was like, one man? Not only was that not possible, it actually looked ridiculous. It just felt like they needed to take the plane down and did not care if we, the viewers, believed it or not. The other actors in this movie too are cool, and the bad guy seems to be off the hinges and did some unpredictable things that had me like, hmm.

Here is the plot: The two leaders do not actually like each other and after the failed joint mission, which was actually a success on the side of the bad guy, an arms dealer. The two leaders decide to travel on Air Force One together, to show a form of united front.

Turns out, Air Force One was infiltrated, and it crashed in Belarus. Everyone thinks the two leaders are dead, but they survived and have to find their way to Poland, to a safe house, and await being saved. But the bad guy has infiltrated the American surveillance system and now has access to many of the secret files of the U.S. and other NATO countries, which were released to the public to cause chaos among the nations. To make it worse, the safe house is not safe, as the infiltrated system gave up their location. Now the two leaders must escape and find another way to get back to their countries.

One of other things I liked about the movie is the cheesy lines do not actually make me cringe, because when they are delivered by Cena, the look on Idris’ face makes you laugh. I applaud the action sequences in this movie and loved how much John Cena could not cope with being a real badass action guy in real life. What I can say is, some of the silliness gets overboard in this movie, making you wish they toned it down a bit. Some of the cinematography, from my point of view, could have been better, and the movie plot is very ridiculous, so you will need to suspend a lot of your reasoning capabilities to enjoy it. Other than that, I recommend you see it. It was a fun idea that I liked very much.