Some plot problems
I really like both Kelly MacDonald and Bill Nighy, and I enjoyed the interactions between their characters.
However, this movie required too many suspensions of disbelief. I could accept maybe one of the following in a film, but in aggregate it was just too much.
1. How likely is it that someone as introverted and nearly social retarded as Nighy's character would have been elevated into such an important position advising a top government official. That level of policy making is so intense and demanding, it seemed unlikely to me that he or his work would ever have stood out to any degree, especially given how reticent he was throughout. I can see someone being an effective top nerdy policy wonk and yet a complete imbecile dealing with the opposite sex outside of work, but he was equally withdrawn at work. I just didn't buy that someone like him would even have that job.
2. It is frankly absurd that she would be allowed to go hobnob with the leaders of the G8 without a cursory background check. I know there was a deleted scene that tepidly broached this, but this is a huge oversight that was necessary to facilitate the equally ludicrous climax.
3. The politics of this movie go beyond naive to the point of being the kind of thing you'd expect from a first grader, and the conceit that her well-meaning but logistically preposterous and philosophically inane speech would have any effect on seasoned politicians who have spent their lives wrestling with the real world complications of these kinds of policies made me laugh out loud. These are the kinds of promises politicians make to sound good but know are deeply improbable.
It's all well and good to agree that it's sad when children die, but to earnestly suggest that "solving third world poverty" is as simple as G8 leaders agreeing not be so greedy is almost as farcical as it is nauseating. I suppose Gina will be pleased at the massive military assaults the G8 will have to carry out to invade these impoverished countries and depose the corrupt governments for there to be any chance of aid actually reaching the suffering people, and she will accept the heartbreak of massive wars, civil wars, and all of the ensuing collateral damage and wreckage that accompany them. After all, it's not like billions of dollars of aid is not already going to these countries and having very little real effect because of the institutional and cultural bulwarks in place at virtually every level of transaction.
The problem with any utopian political crusade that aims to solve some nagging omnipresent issue like poverty or hunger or crime or war or whatever is that their grand noble paper theories never take into account the wildcard that brings us all of this dysfunction: human nature. It is flawed and cannot be fixed, no matter how hard you try to hammer out a new mold for mankind.
The G8 countries could willfully impoverish themselves by transferring all of their wealth to the world's most squalid corners and make very little impact -- aside from there no longer being any wealthy western economies left able to give foreign aid in the future!
Anti-poverty efforts like ONE should really be called "Global Poverty Initiatives" because that is most likely outcome if their objectives were ever pursued with any commitment. I'm sure that's something those G8 leaders would be proud to claim after the fact: "We were the ones who finally acted and destroyed the well-functioning Western society in pursuit of an ill-thought idealistic crusade that never had a prayer of actually working! Celebrate us!"
OK, that turned into more of a tirade than I was planning. Really, the lack of a security check was the biggest goof, and the rest cascaded from there.