Heart of Stone premieres August 11 on Netflix
Someone find Gal Gadot a worthy franchise to front, because Heart of Stone is not it. Netflix’s latest original action thriller plunks Gadot into the world-weary role of Rachel Stone, a gorgeous and super competent operative for Charter, an international underground peacekeeping organization who spy on the spies to maintain some murky mission statement about global balance. With the help of The Heart – referred to as “the world’s most powerful AI” – she is assigned to travel the world blowing up a lot of stuff and “stopping the bad guys” whomever they may be. Stone has the ennui of James Bond and the passport of Carmen Sandiego but is neutralized by a script stuffed with cardboard characters.
Heart of Stone opens with a lot of promise in an action-packed, super-sized prologue that introduces us to Stone on her first field mission with an established MI6 infiltration team that includes Jamie Dornan’s Parker. They’re assigned to an exclusive, mountain top Italian ski resort where a notorious arms dealer is about to make a very dangerous deal. Stone is undercover as the “green” tech noob they think they have to coddle. Turns out she’s actually a Charter operative tagging along to make sure the arms don’t get into the wrong hands.
What ensues are the most visually inventive set pieces of the movie, shot as the sun sets on the snow-packed Italian mountains, which Stone has to descend in the dark. At the very least, the prologue is visually arresting and establishes what The Heart looks like and can do, which is compile data on everything and everyone so it can predict outcomes with precision.
In Stone’s case, The Heart also functions as the tethered, virtual mission buddy that tells her where to go and what to do, as the machine’s handler, Jack (Matthias Schweighöfer), crunches numbers in a basement HQ far away. His role is to snark as he makes fast hand gestures and swoopy-swoops over digital images; a poor man’s Lydia Tár conducting expensive VR. The quantum computer is so powerful that everyone who knows about it likes to ominously whisper: “If you own The Heart, you own the world.” Yet what’s utterly baffling is that halfway through, all of The Heart’s pretty bells and whistles are shut down, ripping away the one unique thing Heart of Stone had going for it. Unless they ran out of VFX money, it’s an utterly confusing choice.
Nevertheless, a brilliant young hacker named Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt), who has a personal vendetta against The Heart, is determined to gain control of it via her own posse of oppositional thinkers and thugs. As Stone is all work and no play – perhaps some would even say she’s exploited by Charter – they share a sad-girl vibe of reciprocal understanding throughout the film. Director Tom Harper’s smartest call is to lean into Gadot’s inherent ability to create empathy between characters, which adds a lot of spark to Rachel and Keya’s scenes. But any real exploration of who they are as people, rather than their ideological leanings, is run over by the film’s frenetic pace.
Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder’s script allows no space for any substantive moments of backstory or nuance for anyone in the cast. This is Heart of Stone’s Achilles heel: Stone and company are reduced to a collection of spy character tropes, saddled with consistently cringe-worthy dialogue, or worse, used as cannon fodder to elicit some kind of unearned emotional moment for the protagonist. But maybe that’s for the best, because otherwise the audience would have too much time to question the logic of how the people onscreen can survive a desert hike for hours with no water. Or how so many bullets never manage to hit Stone, even in open areas. At least when The Heart is operational, there’s a quasi-legitimate excuse for Stone’s inordinate good fortune. When it’s offline, the whole film devolves into improbable fantasy.
Heart of Stone is slick-looking but composed entirely of empty calorie set pieces that crib heavily from other contemporary action films like The Gray Man, Extraction, or Red Notice. It ticks so many familiar boxes that by the end, you can anticipate every mustache-twirling reveal, “surprise” death, or eye-rolling countdown clock. It’s hard to get excited for future Stone adventures when there’s no reason to care about the characters left standing at the end of this one.
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