G20 review – Viola Davis plays president in so-so action thriller

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The Oscar winner plays a soldier turned world leader forced to fight back in Amazon’s simple, serviceable star vehicle Released just three months after the inauguration, geopolitical action thriller G20 was always going to have unavoidable resonance. While the shoot ended back in March last year, there must have been points during the post-production process when those involved wondered if their film – a rousing story of a Black female president taking charge – would coincide with a similar, albeit less schlocky, real world victory. But it wasn’t to be and instead the film has landed on Amazon at a far less inspiring time for America when a president has decided to destroy rather than save his country. Any links to be made from fiction to fact push Trump’s agenda closer to that of the bad guys, who aim to tank the global economy and stop a perceived US overspend of foreign aid. While there are moments that might unintentionally insist us to make the connection (lead villain expressin...
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Fear the Night review – Neil LaBute on losing streak with atrocious home invasion thriller

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The director of In the Company of Men continues his run of terrible films with this awfully acted, ungripping drama

In the most dismaying possible way, Neil LaBute has done it again. The dramatist and film-maker who gave us the 90s toxic masculinity classic In the Company of Men and the interesting and undervalued Samuel L Jackson thriller Lakeview Terrace in 2008, seems now to be going through a period of churning out exploitation content like a hack-for-hire. Last year we had the dismal revenge horror House of Darkness; now it’s this terrible home invasion thriller, with awful acting, clunking dialogue cues and drearily ungripping action and suspense sequences, along with a ChatGPT-ish title.

Maggie Q plays Tess, a military veteran who has seen action in Iraq and is now a recovering alcoholic struggling with a return to civilian life. She agrees to come to her sister’s bachelorette party (despite being out of place with all the girly types), and the bride-to-be has implausibly decreed this should take place in the big old remote house once occupied by her recently deceased parents, a place where there is – in accordance with time-honoured movie tradition – no mobile phone coverage. They all show up and find themselves under attack for a bizarrely elaborate reason. Much later, a gloomy epilogue has a misogynist sheriff disbelieve Tess’s version of events, which is not completely unreasonable of him. It could be a screenwriting way of sneakily conceding how weirdly contrived it has all been.

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