It has been nearly four decades since John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988) helped to redefine the American action movie, and since then there have been so many Die Hard’s on or in a Fill-in-the-Blank that any reasonable person would lose count. The good ones, like Jan De Bont’s Speed (1994)—or Die Hard on a Bus—had enough originality and ingenuity to make us forget the comparison. The lesser ones, like Peter Hyams’s Sudden Death (1995)—or Die Hard in a Hockey Arena—wore their copycat status a little too obviously.

G20 sits somewhere in the uncomfortable middle. Given that it is set almost entirely inside a massive South African hotel that has been taken over by terrorists, its debt to the Die Hard School of Spatially Contained Action Heroics is unavoidable, which makes it at times feel derivative. But, there are also just enough creative and clever choices to elevate it above the worst of McTiernan’s laziest imitators. It doesn’t help, though, that film follows in the wake of the Mike Banning series, which found Gerard Butler’s Secret Service agent caught in various dire entrapments with world-resounding consequences (the first was 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen, in which terrorists take over the White House and kidnap the President). What does help is the presence of Viola Davis as President Danielle Sutton, a tough-as-nails but still liberal-hearted Chief Executive who won office largely on a widely mediated image of her as a soldier rescuing a child from collapsed building in Fallujah. Having watched Davis obliterate African warriors in The Woman King (2022) and evade all manner of legal traps in the television series How to Get Away With Murder (2014–2020), it isn’t difficult to imagine her going from running the country to taking down bad guys with increasingly large weapons (I’d vote for her).

G20’s scenario, as cooked up by two separate teams of screenwriters (Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss and Logan Miller and Noah Miller), imagines what might happen if a well-organized paramilitary group was able to take control of the G20 summit, where the heads of the largest and most powerful nations meet annually to address global issues. The summit is taking place at the aforementioned hotel in South Africa, and President Sutton is planning to push her new program for solving world hunger. The event is hijacked by a group led by Rutledge (Antony Starr), a sneering Australian soldier who nurses an enormous grudge against the world’s leading powers and aims to do nothing less than upend the global economic order (and enrich himself at the same time) using deepfake videos and crypto currency.

Of course, Sutton is able to slip out of the commotion with the help of her primary bodyguard, Agent Manny Ruiz (Ramón Rodríguez), along with a few others than include Britain’s boisterous and amusingly crude prime minister, Oliver Everett (Douglas Hodge). Also in the building are Sutton’s husband, Derek (Anthony Anderson), and their teenage kids, Serena (Marsai Martin), who is rebellious and angry but whose hacking and computer skills are sure to come in handy at some point, and Demetrius (Christopher Farrar), the “good one.” With the world’s leaders held hostage in a ballroom, Rutldge and his goons stalking the premises, and the police and military standing impotently outside the locked gates while Sutton plots and plans how to rescue them, the Die Hardiness of the situation couldn’t be more direct.

And, for the most part, it works well enough. Director Patricia Riggen, who has primarily directed dramas and comedies but also helmed the mine-disaster movie The 33 (2015) and several episodes of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, has a solid grasp of the mechanics of action scenes, and she also knows how to channel Viola Davis’s intensity to maximum effect. Unfortunately, these also means that much of G20 coasts on the back of Davis, a four-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner who can always be relied upon to switch gears between tender and terrible, gentle and violent, vulnerable and aggressive (one of her best moments has her telling the dedicated Ruiz, who has been shot and is at risk of dying, that she is going to kill him if he makes her cry). The film is hampered by some lousy digital effects, but thankfully most of the action is done in real time in real locations; in this genre, physicality matters.

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