“Heads of State,” now streaming on Prime Video, is an insanely entertaining summer movie blockbuster that you can watch from the comfort of your living room. It stars John Cena, as a former action hero turned President of the United States, and Idris Elba, as a stuffy Prime Minister, who are forced to band together and go on an adventure, even though they don’t like each other much.
The movie harkens back to the slick, studio-produced action comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, and delivers some hard-charging set pieces inside a PG-13 framework that the entire family can enjoy. (It’s also got a killer supporting cast that includes Jack Quaid, Priyanka Chopra, Stephen Root, Carla Gugino and a sneering Paddy Considine as the big bad.) It’s a hoot. And proof that you don’t have to leave your house for one of the year’s best summer movies.
Much of what makes “Heads of State” so enjoyable is the direction from Ilya Naishuller, who previously made “Hardcore Henry” and “Nobody.” He knows how to stage set pieces that are muscular and thrilling, while never pushing things too far. A great example of Naishuller‘s approach is a sequence, early on, where Cena and Elba have to flee an Air Force One that has come under attack.
When Naishuller came onto the project he tweaked it in a significant way – he wondered if the movie could be an action comedy instead of an action thriller. Cena went from being a battle-hardened ex-soldier to an affably goofy former action movie star. (Naishuller said he thinks about the movie as “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” with guns.) And this tweak, away from a straightforward action movie, helped inform the Air Force One sequence in particular.
“The whole point of it was, the guys are not heroic in this particular sequence. They’re being led. So they are behaving like I would behave if I was on that plane – I’d be terrified,” Naishuller said. The only heroic things they do is check on the people who are on the plane and ask if they can double-up on the parachutes to see if they could save more people. “Everything else, there’s sheer terror in their eyes, which I think is just a lot more fun than having two guys who are like, ‘We got this.’ They’ll get there but they start off the hero’s journey as people who are not quite capable of being the protectors you’d expect.”
Naishuller said that he storyboards things religiously and it took him five months to storyboard everything for “Heads of State.” By contrast, with the same people, it took him a month-and-a-half to do the storyboards for “Nobody.” The Air Force One sequence was re-boarded 10 times – there were versions that more heavily involved fighter jets that are alongside the plane and a version where a chef character is racing Elba and Cena’s character through the plane. But Naishuller had to be ruthless. He was up against the wall, in terms of story and time, and knew he just needed to get on with it.
“I was thinking, Look, we’re going to get to the 30th minute of the movie and then we need to hit our act two. And I’m feeling that it doesn’t matter if you have an incredible 12-minute sequence, you want to get to what the film is about, and that’s those two guys alone with no means of support going through enemy territory,” Naishuller said. “That’s why I kept chipping away.”
Naishuller was aided in the sequence with some pretty dazzling visual effects, including a fully computer-generated Air Force One and shots that seem to be attached to missiles that are hurtling towards the plane. “Obviously we can’t go up there and shoot the thing for real. But how would we shoot it if we could?” Naishuller said. (He said he did break his own rule for two shots during the sequence because they were cool.) He imagined shots that could be captured of Air Force One from another plane in the sky, attempting to ground the camerawork in real physics so that the spell is never broken.
One thing that was cut from the sequence was a moment with a security pod that is ejected out of Air Force One. This has been a legend for as long as Air Force One has flown and been dramatized in movies ranging from John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York” to Harrison Ford in “Air Force One.” “It just felt like we’re going unnecessarily too big. I mean, the whole sequence was going to be big, but I was like, Why do we need to go that big? It’s the first action scene with our two guys. I don’t want it to be too fantastical as much as I love the shots,” Naishuller explained.
And while he didn’t get to use the pod – which is still unconfirmed – he did take from real-life for a sequence later in the movie, when Cena uses a blood reserve in the presidential limousine to thwart some baddies. Naishuller found a cross-section of Barack Obama’s limousine, which showed that there was a blood reserve. “That’s such an obviously smart idea – if the President’s hurt right there, then you don’t need to get to a hospital. You plug him up and you’ll be able to at least keep him alive till the true emergency services show up.” It was the epitome of something that was both over-the-top and “somewhat grounded,” according to Naishuller. “Yes, it will be silly. But it was a walking that tone,” he said. And what a tone it is.
“Heads of State” is streaming on Prime Video now.
