Let’s call it a coincidence that three similar action movies premiered on the same weekend last month. G20, The Amateur, and Warfare all consider how the United States extends power into the world.
These films depict, respectively, a terrorist attack at the G-20 summit, a CIA cryptographer’s quest for revenge, and an Iraq War mission gone wrong. They do so with varying degrees of seriousness but with a shared commitment to depicting excessive violence and carnage. They also all seem to hedge against the unknowns of the 2024 U.S. election, striving to say something apolitical about the idea of the United States without alienating their audiences.
Needless to say, the world today is different from when these movies were conceived. Since returning to the White House in January, Donald Trump has gutted government institutions and upended Washington’s place in the international system. In only a few months, the United States has turned into a villain on the world stage, seemingly intent on retaliation, antagonism, and revisionism.
Trump’s second term has made these movies feel prescient in some moments and ironic in others. And though none sought to capture the United States in detail, they each inadvertently tapped into a shared sense of guilt about the costs of American exceptionalism.
As Trump makes his global agenda quite clear, it seems unlikely that even the Hollywood treatment of U.S. foreign policy can distract viewers from the reality of it.
Viola Davis and Antony Starr in G20. Ilze Kitshoff/Prime Video/Amazon MGM Studios
In G20, Viola Davis plays U.S. President Danielle Sutton, a leader whose political and military credentials are ultimately less important than her gender. Joined by her family, Sutton attends the annual G-20 summit with the hopes of establishing a new digital finance mechanism to empower African farmers. Her diplomatic prospects wane when an Australian crypto terrorist, Edward Rutledge (Antony Starr), and his mercenaries seize the venue and attempt to take the G-20 leaders and their families hostage. Sutton escapes and reluctantly embraces her military past, transforming from a stoic politician to a terrorist-hunting action hero.
The movie insists on conflating the personal with the geopolitical: A threat to Sutton’s family is literally a threat to the state, as is apparent from the film’s opening shots, when a high-stakes chase for a cryptocurrency wallet is spliced with an Oval Office crisis briefing on the president’s teenage daughter sneaking out of the White House to party at a college bar.
Sutton’s job as president is to protect her country, but it is given equal weight with her responsibility to protect her family. One reporter makes this explicit at a press conference, asking, “How do we know you can protect us if you can’t keep your house in order?”
This insistence on the female president being a mother-in-chief makes G20’s gender politics infuriating. Sutton is never just a president; she is first and foremost always a woman. Though she makes a point of shedding her femininity (her choice to wear sneakers over heels seems to be an omni-metaphor for her personality), she cannot outrun her gender. The film suggests that gendered microaggressions are a bigger threat to Sutton than the armed terrorists at the summit. And despite the president’s military training, her undoing in combat is that she’s such a good mother and wife, one who values preserving her family’s lives more than her own.
Beyond Sutton, G20 centers women characters only to boil down their strengths, weaknesses, ambitions, and fears to just “woman.” The world’s female leaders all seem to have impostor syndrome. And the movie’s biggest betrayals come from a woman—which perhaps represents progress—but even this villain is only driven by gender-motivated jealousy. G20 passes the Bechdel test, but it comes at the cost of lines like, “I was a hot mess, and you saved me. Now I’ve got to go save the world.”
Halfway in, G20 takes a brief but interesting turn when Rutledge explains the terrorists’ motivations. They see themselves as seeking justice against world leaders who have enriched themselves at the expense of global citizens. Rutledge accuses the United States of stealing other countries’ resources to bolster the U.S. dollar; he says that Sutton betrayed her country “when she decided farmers in Africa were more important than farmers in America.”
Rutledge’s critiques are familiar: U.S. hypocrisy, corruption, and naked self-interest within the international system are well documented in the real world. Sutton’s hollow response does little to refute these accusations, and after spending much of the movie cheering for a girl boss president with an assault rifle, it’s enough to make the audience wonder if she—and thus the United States—is the real villain.
But ultimately, G20’s treatment of gender is essential to its rendering of U.S. foreign policy. Sutton can’t be evil because she is a mother and a wife; the United States can’t be a villain because this movie has endowed it with this moral blessing. Any violence undertaken in the name of protection—for a biological family or the imagined community of a nation—is absolved from moral considerations.
This theme of protection looms over Trump’s second term. His administration has gone to extreme lengths to eradicate supposed threats to U.S. prosperity both at U.S. borders and within the federal bureaucracy. Even as the Trump administration is dominated by men, these efforts have benefitted from the endorsement and participation of women.
Rami Malek as Charlie Heller in The Amateur.John Wilson/20th Century Studios
A similarly trite game of identity and revenge takes place in The Amateur. CIA cryptographer Charlie Heller’s (Rami Malek) whole deal is loving his wife. But once again, the American family unit is compromised when Heller’s supervisors inform him that his wife was killed in a random terrorist attack while traveling in London.
Heller wants justice, but he is stifled by bureaucracy and told to be patient while agents look into the case. He is reminded that the CIA’s work is “decidedly binary,” and no binary seems stronger than that between agents, the confident jocks who wear hoodies, and analysts, the deskbound nerds who exclusively wear blue collared shirts. Like G20’s Sutton, Heller is constantly reminded of what the world thinks of him: He’s too weak and cowardly to be a man of action.
Emasculated but determined, Heller gives his superiors an ultimatum: Train him to hunt down his wife’s killers, or he will leak evidence of their malfeasance—disguising politically motivated drone strikes against allies as suicide bombings—to the press. The bosses relent, and Heller hunts down his wife’s killers through Europe one by one, relying not on brute force but on his technical savvy and wits.
Seen in 2025, The Amateur might seem like a thrilling dream for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. In the film, the CIA is bloated with desk jockeys who don’t understand the need to move fast and break things, and Heller’s story is a rogue actor’s revenge fantasy against the sneering know-it-alls who uphold the system designed to keep truth-seers in their place. Transparency and accountability can only be achieved through abrasive, sometimes violent means.
The Amateur asks the audience to root for its vengeful protagonist—by extension, it is also rooting for the nation. Crucially, the film acknowledges its hero’s and the United States’ immorality, portraying the CIA as corrupt and dishonest about how U.S. power is used overseas. At one point, Heller confronts his wife’s killer, who argues that the analyst’s calculated killings are crueler than the terrorists’ utilitarian acts of violence.
But this intermission is short-lived. By the end of The Amateur, it’s clear that the evils of terror and revenge pale in comparison to the institutional evils of sluggishness and status quo. The CIA promises to change, and Heller endorses its transformation by becoming an agent, effectively waving away any guilt the audience might feel for what either party has done.
A scene from Warfare.Murray Close/Real Time Situation LLC
Warfare has a tougher time accounting for the United States’ wrongdoing in the world. Written and directed by Alex Garland, who directed last year’s Civil War, and former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, Warfare recounts a harrowing mission undertaken by Mendoza’s team during the Iraq War. The platoon commandeers the home of an Iraqi family to surveil nearby al Qaeda members. Their cover is blown, and an IED severely wounds two soldiers, sending the group into a desperate attempt to survive and evacuate.
The film is an exercise in profound literalism, constructed from real soldiers’ memories of that day. It is largely told in real time and fixates on detail in lieu of plot or character development. There is no musical score, only the sound of breathing, gunfire, screaming, birdsong, the clicking and swishing of gear. Its jargon is foreign to civilians. It does not gloss over the exhaustion of war, nor the boredom of it. The result is affecting: a real feat of empathy by way of sensory immersion.
Warfare’s creators insist that the film is apolitical and that to politicize it is to miss the point. But because war is inherently political, it’s not unreasonable for viewers to search for moral clarity. On one hand, the film leaves no doubt that war is hell, and the United States should be ashamed for what it has asked of the people it sends to fight on its behalf. On the other, Warfare ultimately demands empathy for those tasked with waging a misguided war. Further, it has been released as the U.S political right—which has successfully politicized the military—is ascendant, and Washington seems to be washing its hands of obligation or guilt for how its actions affect the rest of the world.
A scene from Warfare.Murray Close/Real Time Situation LLC
It feels fitting, given the themes of G20 and The Amateur, that the action of Warfare takes place inside a home. The camera returns to the Iraqi family often, seen huddling in a first-floor bedroom, shaken as the soldiers are by the incoming attacks. More frequently, the viewer is reminded that the soldiers are left to care for each other’s wounds in their own familial structure. Though Iraqis are not afforded the same radical empathy as the platoon, Warfare at least acknowledges its own myopia: It sees both the soldiers and the family as victims of U.S. imperialism.
Warfare is mostly successful in maintaining its ambivalence, but certain moments in the film feel morally instructive. When the medical evacuation team finally arrives, one soldier changes the tone of the room. He is rambunctious and irreverent, and it’s clear to the viewer that his brand of machismo isn’t welcome. The contrast is obvious: However morally compromised this war may be, Warfare insists that its protagonists are not.
In his first inaugural address in 2017, Trump railed against the supposed violence and decay that had overtaken U.S. cities under Democrats’ watch. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he said. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.”
Watching these three movies in short succession, the sheer accumulation of bloodshed is upsetting. But outside the walls of the theater, as Trump settles into his second term, it’s hard not to see the president’s “America First” ideology as carnage in and of itself. These movies clearly criticize the United States—G20 for its plundering, The Amateur for its dishonesty, and Warfare for its myopia. But each also portrays U.S. state actors as wounded and deserving of empathy despite their actions.
This framing is convenient: Since everyone is morally compromised in some way and all evils are equally bad, viewers don’t have to feel guilty about siding with the United States and the individuals who commit violence on its behalf. As a genre, action movies are more concerned with entertaining than they are with moralizing. Yet if patriotic action movies of the past expressed little guilt about the role of the United States in the world, new iterations seem to hope that acknowledging this guilt will absolve them of it.
With Trump back in the White House, this notion now seems quaint. These movies were not prepared to reckon with a United States that no longer harbors remorse or illusions about its conduct.
