Producers: Peter Safran and John Rickard   Director: Ilya Naishuller   Screenplay: Josh Applebaum, André Nemec and Harrison Query   Cast: Idris Elba, John Cena, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Carla Gugino, Jack Quaid, Stephen Root, Sarah Niles, Richard Coyle, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Katrina Durden, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Clare Foster, Adrian Lukis, Sharlto Copley and Paddy Considine   Distributor: Prime Video/Amazon-MGM Studios

Grade: C

There’s not much to this movie, a silly buddy action-comedy about a bickering US President and British Prime Minister who bond after Air Force One is shot down by a Russian terrorist and they’re forced to fend for themselves in hostile territory, but it does serve as a case study of how even the dumbest pictures can be affected by radical changes in real-world politics.

John Cena plays Will Derringer, a newly-elected US President—a former action movie star turned popular politician (think an American-born Arnold Schwarzenegger)—en route to a NATO conference in Italy.  He’s come to England for a brief stopover with British Prime Minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), a prim and proper sort who worked his way up from humble beginnings through the ranks—Army, Parliament and government—and has little respect for a publicity-hound celebrity like Derringer.  Will, meanwhile, is still smarting over Clarke’s decision to have a fish-and-chips lunch with his opponent during the recent campaign, reading that as an endorsement of the other guy.

So their meeting would be uncomfortable even if it weren’t happening in the shadow of an intelligence disaster—a joint CIA-MI6 operation in Spain to capture elusive Russian arms dealer Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine, a decidedly dull villain) that turned out to be a trap in which many agents were killed, apparently including team leader Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), and a cutting-edge global system of surveillance and data storage was hacked by Gradov’s computer genius Arthur Hammond (Stephen Root, whose comic talents are sadly underused).

After a prickly press conference in which the two men publicly show their annoyance with each other, their respective chief advisors—Will’s Simone Bradshaw (Sarah Niles) and Clarke’s Quincy Harrington (Richard Coyle)—suggest that to rehabilitate the Anglo-American “special relationship,” Clarke fly with Derringer aboard Air Force One to the conference in Trieste.  Both men are thus aboard the plane—a new one, as Will emphasizes with inordinate pride—when Gradov’s interceptors attack.  They alone are able to parachute out before it goes down with a bang.

The world presumes they’ve died along with everyone else, but they’ve landed alive and impossibly unscathed—unfortunately in the wilds of Belarus (the geography is admittedly a bit fuzzy).  After an encounter with some ruffians they’re transported in a sheep cart to Poland by a gruffly admiring farmer (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) and take refuge at a so-called safe house in Warsaw, where they’re welcomed by enthusiastic agent Marty Comer (Jack Quaid).  Unfortunately, the place is assaulted by a small army of Gradov’s minions led by assassins Olga (Katrina Durden) and Sasha (Aleksandr Kuznetsov).

The third act features a supposed corpse returned to life; one of those chases through the streets of a lovely city, marked by random destruction, that have become commonplace in such fare; and a big finale set at the NATO conference, where the alliance is on the verge of collapse (a result of embarrassing files leaked by Gradov) despite the efforts of Elizabeth Kirk (Carla Gugino), the US Vice President raised to the presidency as a result of Derringer’s presumed death; and a last massive intervention from Gradov and his army.  That’s followed by a postscript featuring yet another resurrection.

“Heads of State” is billed as an action comedy, but the emphasis is on the former, with the latter limited to rather lame banter between the stars and the sequences featuring Dapkunaite and Quaid, who are actually funnier than the leads despite Herculean efforts from Elba and Cena to inject energy into their scenes together.  (Quaid earns more laughs in his brief turn than he did in the whole of the misguided “Novocaine.”)  To be sure, the action set-pieces, as staged by director Ilya Naishuller, a bevy of stunt people and cinematographer Ben Davis, are reasonably well done, and Steven Price’s score supplies them with the familiar beats.  But as edited by Tom Harrison-Read they drag on to inordinate length—that chase through Trieste seems to last forever, as does the final showdown with Gradov.  Otherwise the picture looks good, thanks to Davis and production designer Niall Moroney.

Throughout its convolutions the script has gone to extremes to keep us guessing about the identity of the chief villain behind the whole plot.  Is it Gradov?  He’s surely a bad fellow, but the writers suggest there’s someone else pulling the strings, and point an accusing finger at either Bradshaw or Harrington (or both).  The identity of the person in charge won’t be revealed here, but when the motive behind all the skullduggery is revealed, it takes a form that seems more reflective of 2022-2023, when the movie was shot, than to 2024.  In the earlier period, it was the general consensus that one of then-President Biden’s triumphs was in strengthening, even expanding, NATO, and the success of Derringer and Clarke lies in saving the alliance against the evil designs of someone whose denigration of it from an “America First” perspective sounds now like the actual rhetoric of the Trump administration.  Even Derringer’s earlier gloating over his new Air Force One assumes a satirical tone in view of Trump’s eagerness to accept a plane from Qatar as his official, more palatial presidential ride.

Perhaps the real-life political shift played a role in the decision to forgo a theatrical release and send “Heads of State” directly to the streaming service affiliated with Jeff Bezos, who’ cultivating President Trump’s favor now.  Or maybe not; in any venue the movie would remain a brainless exercise in comic slapstick, wit-free dialogue and overextended action set-pieces.

Producers: Trevor Macy and Mike Flanagan   Director: Mike Flanagan Screenplay: Mike Flanagan   Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Annalise Basso, Benjamin Pajak, Karen Gillan, Mia Sara, Matthew Lillard, Carl Lumbly, The Pocket Queen (Taylor Gordon), Samantha Sloyan, Jacob Tremblay, Kate Siegel, Cody Flanagan, Rahul Kohli, Q’orianka Kilcher, Antonio Raul Corbo,  Nick Offerman and Mark Hamill   Distributor: Neon

Grade: C

In 1987 R.E.M. sang “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”  In 2020 Stephen King’s novella “The Life of Chuck,” one of three pieces in the collection “If It Bleeds,” depicted what could be called “It’s the End of the World as He Knows It,” or more simply “The End of Chuck’s World,” though King structured the story in reverse order as a puzzle the reader would have to work out. 

Writer-director Mike Flanagan, whose devotion to King is well known, embraces that structure in his adaptation of the tale.  Indeed, his drive for fidelity has led him to have the film narrated from beginning to end by Nick Offerman in words that might diverge somewhat from King’s but are so close that it’s practically like listening to an audiobook.  It’s a clumsy device, but one can understand Flanagan’s decision to use it, because without it most viewers would be unlikely to understand what they’re seeing, and be frustrated by it.

In the first third of the picture, which is chronologically last in the action, the residents of a town are experiencing, along with the rest of the world, a series of natural disasters—floods, tornadoes and much more.  California, in fact, is collapsing into the Pacific.  Amid these devastating events Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a public school teacher, is struggling to convince parents to keep their children in class.  And his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillian), a nurse, is trying to keep the hospital operating along with her colleague (Rahul Kohli).

Marty and Felicia are still friends, and keep in touch by phone.  But they don’t get together in person until the end of the chapter, after each is forced to come to terms with the approaching catastrophe as best they can.  For Felicia, it’s foreshadowed when all the heart monitors flatline even though they’re not connected to any patients.  For Marty it’s made evident when his drive home is stopped by a huge sinkhole.  Conversations with neighbor Gus Wilfong (Matthew Lillard) and Sam Yarbrough (Carl Lumbly), an elderly mortician he meets when walking to Felicia’s house, lead him to ideas about how the how physics, mathematics and philosophy relate to what’s happening.

Finally he and Felicia share their thoughts—including wonderment about an omnipresent ad thanking a bland figure named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) for “39 Great Years!”—before the night sky begins to dim, planet by planet.

The second chapter introduces Chuck Krantz, the mysterious billboard man.  He’s an accountant attending a convention, who’s moved by the drumming of street busker Taylor Franck (The Pocket Queen) not only to begin an impromptu dance but to entice passerby Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso), who’s distraught over being dumped by her boyfriend, to join him in a routine that attracts an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd.  The narrator tells us something about Chuck that’s related to his odd appearance in the previous segment.

Then the third, concluding chapter moves backward to Chuck’s earlier life, when, as a child (Cody Flanagan), he was orphaned and taken in by his grandparents Sarah (Mia Sara) and Albie (Mark Hamill).  Sarah, a homemaker, introduced him to dance, and as an adolescent (Benjamin Pajak) he took it up enthusiastically with encouragement from one of his teachers (Samantha Sloyan), at whose prodding at a school function he took to the floor with a classmate in a pas de deux that earned wild cheers from onlookers, including none other than Marty Anderson. 

But Albie, an accountant, impresses on Chuck the importance of a real profession, and the beauty of numbers.  He also has one absolute prohibition for the boy: never enter the locked cupola atop their house.  The reason is eventually revealed when Chuck (Jacob Tremblay) disobeys the order after the death of Sarah has left Albie an alcoholic wreck; the secret of the room provides a supernatural element to the story.  Chuck later arranges the funeral of his grandfather with Mr. Yarbrough. 

The reappearance of characters from the “first” chapter is a clue to what the entire film is about, but it’s another episode from the last one, in which young Chuck is introduced to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” by another of his teachers (Kate Siegel), that provides the key by positing the notion of the relation between microcosm and macrocosm.  Scenes in which Chuck appears with his wife (Q’orianka Kilcher) and son (Antonio Raul Corbo) make the correlation crystal clear; everything we see is a construct in one man’s mind, a summing-up collage of memory, imagination, joy and regret.

Some will consider what King has done in “The Life of Chuck” deep and touching; others will find it simpleminded and sappy.  What’s less debatable is that Flanagan’s adaptation is an example of fidelity to a source taken to such an extreme that the result feels contrived and ponderous.  Even the dance sequences, which should be exhilarating, are studied, despite the panache with which Hiddleston and (especially) Pajak perform them.  And while some of the performances—Sara’s and Ejiofor’s, for instance—are individually moving, others—Hamill’s, particularly—feel like mere stunts.

The film is certainly well-made, if you don’t mind the sound-stage theatricality in the work of production designer Steve Arnold and cinematographer Eben Bolter and the stagey crisp-as-toast look of Terry Anderson’s costumes.  Flanagan’s lapidary editing, which—again apart from the dances—treats almost every line as a golden nugget to be surrounded with pregnant pauses, accentuates the pretension of it all.

There’s no gainsaying the ambition at work here to say something heartfelt about the human condition and the individual’s relation to the world.  And some viewers will undoubtedly be as moved by it as they are by films like “It’s a Wonderful Life.”   But to many Flanagan’s film, like Robert Zemeckis’ recent “Here,” will come off as a carefully crafted but inertly earnest exercise in pseudo-profundity.