We’ve come a long way since President Harrison Ford booted a Communist radical off his plane in 1997’s Air Force One. A Fallujah war hero turned president, Viola Davis, just took down terrorists as a badass commander in chief in Prime Video’s G20. And now John Cena plays a former Hollywood action star newly installed in the White House and forced into real-life heroics when terrorists crash Air Force One over Belarus.

In addition to some nicely shot (and well-established) action set pieces, Heads of State also morphs into a mismatched buddy movie as Cena’s Will Derringer teams with the U.K.’s military vet prime minister, Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), to evade an army of baddies led by a Russian arms dealer (Paddy Considine). They’re  eventually joined by Clarke’s ex (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), an MI5 operative who’s as quick with a punch as with a punchline, usually of the punning variety.

There’s an interesting timeliness to the story, which centers on an attempt to dissolve the NATO alliance (an idea backed by an America-first politician who complains about European allies that “we give, they take”). But the plotting often defies logic or common sense, with characters acting unpredictably for reasons that seem solely intended to advance the rickety mechanics of the plot. (For example: How in the world did Air Force One, flying from London to Italy, end up crashing in Belarus, which is a good 1,700 miles further East?)

The absurdities of the script stand out in part because Cena and Elba deliver surprisingly grounded and plausible portrayals of their bickering alpha males. Cena is convincing as an overconfident, overpampered creature of Hollywood who expects the world stage to be no different than the soundstages he recently ruled – but there’s a restraint here that’s matched by Elba’s totally reined-in energy. The British actor may be stuck in a ‘90s-style action comedy, but he brings the same seriousness to the project as if it were a new season of Luther. Even when rekindling his romance with Chopra Jonas’s Noel, he resists the light touch you’d expect in a typical rom-com or action comedy. (You keep wishing that he would, even just once, crack a smile.) If the stars had played their roles more broadly, leaning into the goofiness, the film might have gotten away with more of the nutty narrative turns.

Director Ilya Naishuller has a witty way with his camera work, using establishing shots to set up the choreography of those elaborate fight scenes as well as fast-forwarded flashbacks to fill in necessary exposition. That’s especially useful in a film where the action sequences have a Rube Goldberg-like complexity and are often delivered in surprise-laden slo-mo. He’s clearly a student of Guy Ritchie, and he similarly studs his film with notable secondary roles for actors like Stephen Root, Jack Quaid, and the scene-stealing Lithuanian actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite as a Belarusian sheep farmer who rescues the duo at a key moment for reasons that are never explained. Even here, the script lets us down: I kept waiting in vain for some sign of her motivation, like an action figure of one of Derringer’s movie characters dangling from her rearview mirror.

Heads of State is a decent action comedy that meets most of the expectations for the genre. ★★☆☆☆

HEADS OF STATE
Prime Video, PG-13