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.

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........

© Foreign Policy