Cena and Elba team up for buddy movie ‘Heads of State’

“Heads of State” is not the Cheech & Chong reunion film you’ve been waiting for, but a comic thriller co-starring John Cena and Idris Elba, premiered on Wednesday on Prime Video. Previously joined in cultural history by the DC super antihero flick “The Suicide Squad,” the actors have remade their rivalrous characters there into an odd couple of national leaders here, dealing with conspiratorial skulduggery, bullets, bombs and the like.

Call me dim, but I wasn’t even half aware that Cena, whose muscles have muscles, maintains a long, successful career in professional wrestling — which is, of course, acting — alongside his more conventional show business pursuits; he’s ever game to mock himself and not afraid to look dumb, which ultimately makes him look smart, or to appear for all intents and purposes naked at the 2024 Oscars, presenting the award for costume design. (He was winning, too, in his schtick with Jimmy Kimmel.)

Elba, whose career includes a lot of what might be called prestige genre, has such natural poise and gravity that one assumes he’s done all the Shakespeares and Shaws and Ibsens, but “The Wire” and “Luther” were more his thing. He was on many a wish list as the next James Bond, and while that’s apparently not going to happen, something of the sort gets a workout here.

Elba plays British Prime Minister Sam Clarke, described as “increasingly embattled” in his sixth year in office, who is about to meet Cena’s recently elected American president, Will Derringer, on the eve of a trip to Trieste, Italy, for a NATO conference. (Why Clarke is embattled is neither explained nor important.) Derringer resents Clarke, who can’t take him seriously, for having seemed to endorse his opponent by taking him out for fish and chips. (This is a recurring theme.) An international star in the Schwarzenegger/Stallone mold — “Water Cobra” is his franchise — one might call Derringer’s election ridiculous, but I live in a state that actually did elect Schwarzenegger as its governor, twice. Wet behind the ears (“He still hasn’t figured out the difference between a press conference and a press junket,” somebody says), Derringer thinks a lot of himself, his airplane, his knowing Paul McCartney and his position. Beyond aspirational platitudes, he has no real politics, but as we first see him carrying his daughter on his shoulders, we know he’s really OK.

Directed by Ilya Naishuller (“Nobody”) and written by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Harrison Query, the movie begins with a scene set at the Tomatino Festival in Buñol, Spain, in which great crowds of participants lob tomatoes at each other in a massive food fight — it’s a real thing — foreshadowing the blood that will soon be flowing through the town square, as a team of unidentified bad guys ambush the British and American agents who are tracking them. They’ve been set up, declares M16 agent Noel Bisset (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), who is later reported “missing and presumed dead” — meaning, of course, that she is very much alive and will be seen again; indeed, we will see quite a lot of her.

Meanwhile, the prime minister and the president board Air Force One for Trieste. They talk movies: “I like actual cinema,” says Clarke, who claims to have never seen one of Derringer’s pictures. “I’m classically trained,” the movie star protests. “Did you know I once did a play with Edward Norton? But the universe keeps telling me I look cool with a gun in my hand — toy gun.”

Following attacks within and without the plane, the two parachute into Belarus and, for the remainder of the film, make their way here and there, trying to evade the private army of Russian arms dealer and sadistic creep Viktor Gradov (Paddy Considine) led by your typical tall blond female assassin (Katrina Durden). They’ll also meet Stephen Root as a computer guy and Jack Quaid as a comical American agent. Elsewhere, Vice President Elizabeth Kirk (Carla Gugino) takes charge. (“Bad?” is the note I wrote. I’ve seen my share of political thrillers.)

Tribune News Service