Heart of Stone: Film Review
After starring in Netflix’s ensemble action movie Red Notice in 2021, Gal Gadot now leads her own, Heart of Stone.
She plays an intelligence operative named Rachel Stone, who works for a mysterious global peacekeeping agency called The Charter but is undercover in MI6. She must go on a dangerous mission to save The Charter’s most valuable asset, a powerful predictive artificial intelligence system known as The Heart, from falling into the hands of a hacker named Keya (Alia Bhatt).
The biggest problem with Heart of Stone is that it lacks any sense of originality. It’s not awful but it doesn’t do anything to stand out from the crowd. It follows in the footsteps of other big-budget Netflix action movies like Red Notice and The Gray Man by feeling generic and disposable. I found the concept interesting but the story beats are overly familiar, rendering the narrative bland and lifeless. It needed more flair, personality and pizzazz to stop it from feeling so by the book.
Although the dialogue is pretty hit-and-miss and the characters are thin, Gadot does well as the badass field agent. I don’t know how anyone in MI6 believed her to be a timid and useless hacker with no combat experience, but hey ho. She is likeable and awesome in the action sequences, which are decent if you ignore the dodgy CGI.
However, my favourite was actually Bhatt as Keya. She gives her character nuance and humanity in a film seriously in need of those things and grounds the crazy story as much as possible. I also enjoyed Jing Lusi as Stone’s fun-loving MI6 colleague Yang and Sophie Okonedo as her tough boss Nomad.
The weakest link performance-wise was Jamie Dornan as the MI6 agent Parker. Let’s just say it’s not his finest hour. The script and scarce character development don’t help but he’s responsible for some of his interesting choices.
Heart of Stone is a mildly entertaining spy thriller. I just wish Netflix put more love and care into their action output.
On Netflix now