‘Get off my plane!’ The 10 greatest action-movie presidents, ranked

That’s more or less the premise of “Heads of State,” a new Prime Video buddy comedy in which John Cena plays President Will Derringer, an erstwhile action-film star who after surviving a dual assassination attempt must team up Idris Elba’s British Prime Minister Sam Clarke. Clarke is an army veteran with a long public-service résumé who sees Derringer as a vapid lightweight. But these two leaders are about to develop a grudging mutual respect, and then affection, via the traditional means of straight-dude movie courtship: by fleeing, punching and shooting a bunch of traitors and mercenaries together.

These aren’t the first two-fisted heads of state we’ve seen on-screen, but they are part of an elite group. This is not a dossier of movie presidents who outsource their dirty work to the military or covert operatives. I’m talking about presidents who will personally kick a hijacker out of the cargo bay of Air Force One. (See: “Air Force One.”) These kinds of aspirational (?) movie POTUSes had a real moment in the mid-1990s, perhaps inspired by the hand-wringing of conservative pundits about how President Bill Clinton had never served in the military. Certainly, the expectation that our presidential candidates at least perform some version of masculine-coded grit has never gone away.

Please note that the Senate parliamentarian has demanded we abide by an arcane and arbitrary set of eligibility requirements for this list, which state that dramatization of real presidents doing things they (probably) really did are out. So no “PT-109,” about 25-year-old U.S. Navy Lt. John F. Kennedy fighting valiantly in the Solomon Islands. Magically animated statues of presidents don’t count, either, so Robin Williams’s portrayal of the Rough Riders-era Theodore Roosevelt in “A Night at the Museum” is absent. Disaster-movie presidents? Unless they personally rolled up their sleeves and started pulling victims from the wreckage, they’re on a different list.

It was particularly painful to omit Angela Bassett as CIA director turned President Erika Sloane in the latter-day “Mission: Impossible” flicks, given that she’s played all kinds of senior government officials, including director of the Secret Service in “Olympus Has Fallen.” But in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” she’s doing the things movie presidents usually do – frowning, worrying, dressing down insubordinate subordinates, saying (if not actually saying) “May God forgive me” before giving the order to launch. So we had to leave her off. She’ll always be the Queen of Wakanda.

Who’s left? Here are the top 10 action-hero presidents, from worst to best, as assessed by how well we’d sleep at night if one of these (mostly) fictional leaders were in charge.

10. The President (Donald Pleasence)

“Escape From New York” (1981)

Admittedly, he’s the leader of what sure looks like a fascist U.S. at war with the Soviet Union circa 1997 in this trash classic from John Carpenter. For most of this movie, Pleasance is a hostage, having bailed out of the hijacked Air Force One using the maybe-fictional-maybe-not escape pod. (More on that later.) But in the film’s final moments, he picks up a machine gun and deposes Issac Hayes’s The Duke, ruler of the walled-off Manhattan Island that has become a maximum-security prison in this dystopian future-past. In doing so, he saves the life of Kurt Russell’s “Snake” Plissken, the soldier turned convict who has been sent to extract him in exchange for a pardon.

9. Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart)

“Olympus Has Fallen” (2013)

This R-rated Antoine Fuqua joint came out three months before 2013’s other “Die Hard”-in-the-White House movie, the PG-13 “White House Down.” Despite the presence of Eckhart’s Mount Rushmore-ready chin, this movie’s commander in chief isn’t quite as vigorous a participant in his own defense as that one’s is, but “Olympus” opens with Eckhart’s President Asher in the ring at Camp David for a sparring session with his most trusted Secret Service man, played by Scotland’s favorite Ugly American, Gerard Butler. He’d make the grade on that basis alone, but he later headbutts turncoat Secret Service agent Dylan McDermott, then manages to disarm two of his captors when Butler comes in shooting near the climax of the movie. In every way, it’s a much nastier film than “White House Down.”

8. Will Derringer (John Cena)

“Heads of State” (2025)

Beloved for his role in the fictional “Water Cobra” action franchise, Cena’s President William M. Derringer – how ya like those initials, America? – is naive, inexperienced and shallow, but he’s no idiot, and he strives to be worthy of the office to which he’s been elected. When Elba’s PM quips that he’s surprised Derringer didn’t paint flames on Air Force One, Derringer shoots him down: “You’re just jealous because your airplane sucks and it doesn’t have a cool name.”

7. Thomas “Tug” Benson (Lloyd Bridges)

“Hot Shots! Part Deux” (1993)

Certainly we could debate the eligibility of parodies, and this sequel to the “Top Gun”-spoofing “Hot Shots!” aims its satirical crosshairs at “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” “Basic Instinct” and too many other 1980s/early 1990s hits to count. By his own addled accounting, President “Tug” Benson has sustained many injuries in many wars, and like the Joker, he never tells his origin story the same way twice. Still, we see with our own eyes when he personally leads an amphibious commando team to rescue POWs captured during Operation Desert Storm. He then engages in a lightsaber duel (!) with Saddam Hussein, telling the Iraqi dictator they’re going to resolve their utter failure of diplomacy in “the old Navy way: First guy to die loses!” How can Tug not make the list?

6. William Alan Moore (Samuel L. Jackson)

“Big Game” (2014)

Hold on to your butts: A list-making exercise like this is the only way one is likely to stumble upon this Finnish stab at a Hollywood-style blockbuster, which ponied up to have Jackson play the president, whose Air Force One escape pod (“Escape From New York,” “Air Force One”) lands in the Finnish wilderness, where he’s rescued by a 13-year-old boy out for his first solo deer hunt. But you can’t have a 13-year-old do all your killing for you, and President Moore eventually takes out a few of his opponents personally.

5. Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis)

“G20” (2025)

“G20” is the less funny of the two POTUS-and-PM action movies to hit Amazon this year. As a veteran of the Iraq War who later built her campaign around a Time magazine cover showing her rescuing a child from a burning building in Fallujah, Viola Davis is as authoritative and world-weary as you’d expect, and the movie around her is no better. Like Eckhart’s President Asher, she keeps her martial arts skills sharp by sparring with her favorite Secret Service agent – on the White House lawn!

Antony Starr (Homelander in the superhero series “The Boys”) plays the head of a group of crypto-bro terrorists who seize control of the Group of 20 conference in South Africa, taking the leaders of the world’s other largest economies hostage while Davis and British Prime Minister Douglas Hodge sneak around and try to foil their plot. (While Elba’s PM is tough and resourceful, Hodge’s PM is mostly dead weight.) Davis isn’t one for quips, but she goes full John Wick in this thing, personally zeroing out more Tangos than any other commander in chief on this list.

4. James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx)

“White House Down” (2013)

No filmmaker has ever destroyed the president’s house as dramatically or as often as Roland Emmerich, who followed up its destruction-via-death-ray in “Independence Day” and subsequent destruction-via-tidal-wave in “2012” with “White House Down.”

Released five months into President Barack Obama’s second term, the film has Jamie Foxx playing a bookish, clearly Obama-inspired POTUS. As his protector, Channing Tatum plays not a Secret Service agent, but – oh, boy – a Capitol Police officer who’s interviewing for a Secret Service position when the bad guys attack. Like President Marshall in “Air Force One,” Foxx’s President James Sawyer opens the movie by announcing a foreign-policy shift – Peace Good, basically – that makes him some new enemies, including one or two within his own administration.

Though we’re told he’s “never served a day in his life,” Sawyer becomes as hands-on as any POTUS here, picking up a machine gun, then setting it down to put his glasses on before shooting the conspirator who’s throwing down with Tatum’s Officer Cale. Later, he hangs out of the window of a presidential limo to fire a rocket at the White House gate. But the best part is when, wrestling with an attacker who’s grabbing at his lower extremities, President Sawyer orders, “Take! Your! Hands! Off! My! Jordans!” Jed Bartlet couldn’t have put it any more presidentially. You’ll never guess what he says before stabbing an invader with a pen.

3. Abraham Lincoln (Benjamin Walker)

“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (2012)

In this gonzo splatterfest from Timur Bekmambetov, the 16th president’s heretofore-unknown penchant for ax-twirling and head-lopping gets the showcase it demands. Abraham Lincoln spends his adolescence preparing to avenge his mother, whose murder he witnessed when he was just a boy. His first attempt fails on account of the killer being a blood-drinker who’d have a big problem with sunlight, but who can brush off a pistol shot to the face easily enough.

Fortunately, a good vampire chooses to instruct the idealistic lawyer in nosferatu disposal. Star Benjamin Walker played the title role in “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” on Broadway just a couple of years before shooting this even less reverent historical epic. Only in a list as meat-headed as this one could our most rightly revered president win only bronze.

2. Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman)

“Independence Day” (1996)

To quote Will Smith from this UFO-invasion throwback: “Welcome to Earth.” Beloved weirdo character actor Bill Pullman plays a fighter jockey veteran of the 1991 Gulf War who was elected president – and who gets back into the cockpit to lead Earth’s successful counterattack against these slimy extraterrestrial marauders. His standing early in the film suggests he was on the back foot almost immediately after taking office, much like Clinton, who would be reelected by a comfortable margin four months after this movie set up shop for its summer-long dominion of the nation’s multiplexes. (The shot in the trailer of the White House being vaporized by an alien death ray had been getting cheers and applause for half a year.)

Pullman wasn’t much of a blockbuster guy before this, and he hasn’t been since. (Unlike Smith or Jeff Goldblum, he did return for the little-seen 2016 sequel “Independence Day: Resurgence,” in which former president Whitmore made the ultimate sacrifice.) Key to his performance is the way his calm in the face of danger could also be read as a Willy Wonka-like detachment from his own predatory species. The incongruity of Pullman’s casting only makes his turn as Winston Churchill-by-way-of-Chuck Yeager more memorable.

1. James Marshall (Harrison Ford)

“Air Force One” (1997)

President Marshall goes to the front of the line just based on the variety of heroic acts he personally performs in Wolfgang Petersen’s second warmly recalled presidential summer blockbuster. (See also: 1993’s “In the Line of Fire.”) When a group of Russian nationalists led by Gary Oldman hijack Air Force One after Marshall goes off-script to give a foreign-policy-altering address in Moscow, Marshall pretends to flee the scene using the extensively modified 747’s purportedly fictional escape pod (“Escape From New York,” “Big Game”), then stows away and starts taking names – because he won’t leave the first lady or the first daughter behind, even though his oath would seem to compel him do so. Establishing communications with the White House, he orders his own fighter escort to fire on the heavily defended presidential aircraft, and later dumps fuel to try to force the hijackers to land. He takes part in multiple fistfights and gun battles with the hijackers. (No movie has ever fired so many rounds inside a pressurized cabin.)

While Marshall’s credentials are unimpeachable, the hilariously all-thumbs way in which screenwriter Andrew Marlowe tells us about them warrants censure, if not impeachment, unless “Let’s not forget this president is a Medal of Honor winner. He knows how to fight. In Vietnam he flew more helicopter rescue missions than anyone else in my command!” sounds like credible human speech to you. Marlowe later earns himself a pardon by giving Marshall the only zeitgeist-penetrating quip on this list: “Get off my plane!” POTUS says, kicking Oldman into the wild blue yonder. Is President Marshall, decorated helicopter pilot that he is, going to personally get behind the control yoke of Air Force One before this movie is over? You bet your State of the Union address he is.