There probably isn’t a company on earth better associated with immediacy than Amazon. Unless one lives in the remotest regions of Canada or Alaska, there isn’t a place in North America where Amazon isn’t part of one’s daily life in some way or another. Almost any package one could imagine over dinner tonight could be waiting on their doorsteps before they get home from work tomorrow. Even those who avoid it must consciously seek alternatives and make counter-cultural choices because of the ubiquity of the fast-service company. But it’s that immediacy that also makes the already dated political context of Heads of State even more embarrassing. It’s a film that, had it come out in the 2010s, would have stood a chance of riding a momentary wave of relevance; as is, Heads of State is already a relic from another time.
After a successful though shameful career acting in films with names as dumb as Water Cobra, Will Derringer (John Cena) wins the United States’ presidency without any professionalism makeover. He’s an iconoclast to the game of politics, in some ways by refusing to play the game the way it has always been played. He is also shallow and simplistic. Despite all of the parallels to the current American demagogue, Heads of State takes the presidency in an entirely different direction. Derringer sought his office after seeing the world on a press tour and being exposed to the potential of a healthy and flourishing globalist vision for the world. Meanwhile, the UK Prime Minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba) is cut from the type of icon that Derringer prefers to smash. He’s a veteran of the British Army and very much familiar with the political game. The two get along like oil and water, until an assassination attempt forces both a bromance and political cooperation. (If you prefer romance over bromance in your politics-adjacent streaming views, consider checking out Amazon’s Red, White & Royal Blue from two years ago instead.) The pair are presumed dead after Air Force One, carrying both of them, blows up over Eastern European airspace — and the intelligence breach that enabled the attempt on their lives prevents them from contacting either of their governments until they reach the NATO summit in Trieste, Italy.
Indeed, Heads of State doesn’t hide its NATO love. The aggressors here are Belarusian thugs and Russian speakers, so when Air Force One goes down over Slavic airspace, the threat is built into the geography. The two most recognizable assassins chasing the world leaders go by the names Olga the Killer (Katrina Durden) and Sasha the Killer (Aleksandr Kuznetsov). It’s an interesting development, as director Ilya Naishuller is himself Russian and lived in Russia as recently as 2021, but he has also been record about his disdain for the way the Western film industry has used Russians, so it’s bewildering to see him fall into the same traps set by Hollywood Cold War-era antagonists. In any case, back at home the political enemies are conservative isolationists and nationalists, and intelligence leaks that occasion the “assassinations” of the two heads of state catalyze waves of said nationalism and “self-sufficient” rhetoric among other key NATO members like France, Italy, and Germany. These leaks, which usher in retreatist politics, read as extremely similar to the Five Eyes revelations that came out in the 2010s, if those were blown up to a larger scale. As such, the leaks themselves and the horrifying things they reveal are never treated as politically dangerous in themselves: they only distract from NATO trust, as intended by the enemies of the alliance.
As presented in Heads of State, the political after-effects are restricted to government concerns and barely extend into even media discourse; just like the blockbuster action and superhero films that made both Cena and Elba famous, Naishuller’s film shows little interest in the average citizen of either of the two relevant countries. In other words, the script makes sure politics are purely the territory of the electorate and not the electors. The only independent citizens who matter here are the ones behind the conspiratorial attack, and they are not expressly linked to any enemy nation, but rather are independent terrorists going rogue, a creative decision that reeks of studio influence similar to the politically neutered Fakeistan phenomenon. Ultimately, then, the only arguable hint of political subversiveness in Heads of State might be the nationality of its director, which is never a good sign. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization doesn’t make for the sexiest of propaganda subjects in the first place, but it is nonetheless a strange anomaly to find a Russian helmsman for a project funded by an American tech mega-company that has suspended operations in both Russia and Belarus and celebrates Western intelligence alliances and trade partnerships.
Setting that side, Naishuller’s direction leaves plenty to be desired, as he showed far more vision on his first few features than he does with his biggest project yet. His debut, 2015’s Hardcore Henry, produced by the reliable formal maverick Timur Bekmambetov, offered one of the most serious attempts at first-person filmmaking to date. In 2021, he demonstrated his action chops again with the Bob Odenkirk-starring, John Wick cousin film Nobody. Regrettably, Naishuller’s tendency toward high style fades into the background of Heads of State in favor of a studio patina that looks a lot like your average streaming TV show in 2025. There’s at least one shot where his style still pops: a shot with a camera, presumably an artificial one, that captures the perspective of a fight from within the mouth of a Belarusian thug. His teeth — or what is left of them — obscure the top of the frame, while his mouth establishes the rest of the frame’s border. But deliriously fun as this sequence might be in a vacuum, it feels entirely out of place amidst the otherwise generic filmmaking, so much so that it’s a downright shock that it wasn’t left on the cutting room floor.
In the absence of action style, Heads of Style delivers only mere messiness. There are not one but two truly painful-to-endure montages that function to establish what characters have been doing offscreen via exposition, among the most shoehorned in recent memory. Elsewhere, the score from Steven Price recedes into generic action cues that do little to complement or elevate the pro forma material, while the editing somehow moves at a clip between shots but at a snail’s pace between scenes, making the 113 minutes drag into a realfeel that’s easily twice that. But more than anything, Naishuller and Amazon simply missed the sign of the times and made a movie for the previous decade. Even though Derringer is a natural entertainer first and a politician second, the relative normalcy of these two heads of state are likely to alienate viewers currently witnessing extreme polarization, the erosion of democracy, and political violence daily — things that have largely happened through a top-down movement spewed on by populist leaders. And though the thawing of British-American diplomacy at the film’s center might look like relevant material for the moment, the nerves of Trump’s systemic undermining of long-term alliances are too raw for the cutesy fries with vinegar vs. ketchup treatment dealt here. By all accounts, Heads of State should — perhaps, in more normal times, would — be a hit. But these are not normal times, and all of the strange co-mingling of rhetoric and influence here is hardly worth attempting to unravel.
DIRECTOR: Ilya Naishuller; CAST: John Cena, Idris Elba, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Carla Gugino; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon Prime Video; STREAMING: July 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
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