We just watched G20 that was just released on Amazon Prime. It was just cathartic as hell in so many ways, but I'll leave that aside and just talk about the movie itself, which makes me think of several aspects of modern filmmaking and how much worse it is than what directors have created in the past en masse.
I was expecting it to be hammy because of the premise of The President becoming John McLane from Die Hard, but that's completely what it was. What was surprising was that they also really tried to make it a serious action film with real acting and writing with commentary.
I don't like modern films for many reasons, and I don't know if this is a modern trend, but parts felt a little like a poorly written family dramedy. And the subplots in general were half baked, which just felt overall like shitty writing.
Aside from Viola Davis and Ramón Rodríguez, and Sabrina Impacciatore, the car took away from the movie rather than adding to it. Modern films to me tend to have actors that look like such a completely perfect version of their purpose that they, paradoxically, have no character, like they were cast completely from head shots then were all put through some stylist who makes them look like a model on the cover of a soap opera magazine only sold at supermarket checkout stands. And modern acting to me is mostly people looking so stereotypically perfect for the part it's like a caricature of what you would expect that role to be. Which is to say, for many characters there is no acting.
To a lot of actors, they truly think acting is memorizing lines and reciting them like a child summarizing a war in front of class. It's like watching children who think the primary goal here is just to remember every bullet point in the recitation, but not at all to internalize anything that the lines or the themes or the plot lines imply, or, God forbid, to go the extra step to invent anything at all about a character and internalize that. You could, for many modern actors, substitute AI and have the same quality of acting. I see this in actors of every age and ethnicity. They're just casting bad actors, and directors seem to have no interaction with them at all. I'm not sure at all what these directors think they're doing these days.
The action was cool, I think, but it definitely followed a trend of what few modern era action films (outside the Mission: Impossible) series in which the camera movements become so violent that it is hard to tell what's going on with the hand to hand combat, whatever cool moves are happening are obscuring by the jerking motion and disorienting camera angles. There were definitely very cool combat moves, but they had no impact because I would have to sit with a blu-ray and go frame by frame to be able to tell for sure what just happened. The rest of the film was filmed traditionally, so it wasn't like that at all. They really hid the most important element of the film, the action.
I like the very few performances I've seen from Viola Davis; I think she's a serious actor, and she made the overly modern in a bad way movie way better, along with her equality earnest supporting actor Ramón Rodríguez, playing her lead Secret Service agent. Davis plays the film as well as she can with the poor writing, and she's able still to create a character I'm interested to follow. It really makes me want to see her in something that isn't written so poorly. I remember her in Blackhat, the first film that made me lose hope for Michael Mann, and it was a similar situation, in which I was just left shaking my head that a good actor was going to waste under a crap movie.
