HEADS OF STATE'....THE POTUS AND THE P.M. GO ON THE RUN....AND IT'S GUNS 'O FUN....

 Heads of State (Amazon Prime-2025)

     For years now, we've been bemoaning and carping about Netflix's A.I. algorithm attempts to make woeful imitations of 1990's action adventure movies......you know the ones we mean, the stuff that Schwarzeneggar, Cruise, Stallone, Willis and Gibson pumped out every other month. 

       And now, Amazon Prime's taken a shot at it and oh my heavenly rocket launchers, it's rip roarin' fun to watch. 

        For curators of 90's cinema, this might remind you vaguely of the 1996 comedy "My Fellow Americans". That had Jack Lemmon and James Garner as two ex-Presidents who end up as cross country fugitives while trying to put a stop to the nefarious current POTUS (Dan Aykroyd) and his idiot VP. (John Heard).

        'Heads of State' takes this basic premise and runs wild with it, fashioning a laugh-out-loud buddy comedy crossed with a high octane geopolitical Bond/Bourne thriller......complete with incredibly choreographed chases, plane crashes hand-to-hand brawls and assorted stuff blown to smithereens real good.

        The unlikely buddies who find themselves literally under the gun......newly minted POTUS Will Derringer (John Cena) a former action movie star whom the U.S. electorate thinks will kick ass just like he did in the movies. Butting heads and temperaments with Will is U.K. Prime Minister (and genuine army vet) Sam Clarke (Idris Elba).

        Flying on Air Force One together, their petty bickering and overall dislike of each other get interrupted when the plane's blown out of the sky by the forces of renegade Russian arms dealer Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine). 

          The POTUS and PM barely survive via parachutes, but the ground chase across Europe commences, with Gradov's army of assassins in lethal pursuit with state of the art weaponry.

          The comic byplay between the overly confident, blustering Cena and the dry deadpan Elba is hilarious to behold. And the frenzied action never stops, aided by a hard-to-kill MI6 operative (Prianka Chopra Jonas) and an even harder-to-kill (and crazier) CIA station chief (Jack Quaid).

          We'll stop now and spoil no more funny and explosive sequences, and just say for a good hot summer night's viewing, this one's more than worth checking out.

           4 & 1/2 stars (****1/2).