The easy-to-apply criticism of Netflix is that they make big-budget films with massive global stars— “Red Notice” with Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot, and Dwayne Johnson, “The Gray Man” with Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling—the streaming service touts the first weekend numbers (“most streamed ever!!”), and then the films are never heard from again after that opening, let alone ever entering the cultural zeitgeist conversation. So, in theory, the disposability of many Netflix would be a lazy censure to keep trotting out if only it didn’t seem to constantly apply to the streamer’s big hits every few weeks. Case in point, the almost instantly forgettable “Heart Of Stone,” a throwaway spy action thriller starring Gal Gadot that’s barely even entertaining in its stupidity and overly complex double-crosses.
READ MORE: ‘Heart Of Stone’: Gal Gadot Wanted To Create A New Female Action Hero After Watching ‘Bond,’ ‘Mission: Impossible’ & ‘Bourne’ Films
Directed by Tom Harper (“The Aeronauts,” “Wild Rose,” “Peaky Blinders”), one doesn’t want to overdo it with the cliched “Gal Gadot is too beautiful to be ordinary” takes many film critics to use, but “Heart Of Stone” barely bothers to suspend our disbelief and sets up a narrative of the Israeli amazon as a nerdy hacker type in a larger group of spies, who is supposed to be the most unassuming, but promptly displays her as the most interesting person in the room who’s always catching the attention of her operative team leader Parker (Jamie Dornan).
In the vein of ‘Bourne,’ ‘Mission Impossible,’ and ‘Bond’ but without a soul, “Heart of Stone” is essentially about a spy organization trying to stop a super hacker from stealing their own superweapon that they use to “safeguard” the planet, but it is filled with convoluted twists and turns that perhaps try and disguise just how ordinary the script is and how uninspired the paint-by-numbers movie is.
Gadot’s Rachel Stone is not a field agent; she’s the computer geek in the room character—or so we think, but in the Italian Alps, on a mission with her M16 spy team—Parker, Stone, plus Yang (Jing Lusi), Bailey (Paul Ready)— to catch an arms dealer, the truth comes out. She’s a double agent. Clandestinely, she’s a member of the Charter, a secret umbrella espionage peacekeeping operation above M16, the CIA, the FBI, etc., and unknown to all of them.
So while not a bad guy, even though she’s lying to her team, her mission to protect the silly MacGuffin of the film, The Heart—some kind of super A.I. computer tool that the Charter uses to superspy on everyone—is above all else and her team is disposable.
But as is with the cliches of all cliches in the writing, Rachel Stone has a heart of gold and a conscience, and she can’t betray her team, blowing her cover in order to save their lives, and in the process displaying all the super skills she has that she has hidden. In other words, Rachel Stone is a person of integrity, and that’s nice and all, but it doesn’t really save what’s a pretty generic action spy film. Not for nothing, these types of films— often so consumed with creating characters that are competent and skilled— disregard the central rule that characters need flaws, conflicts, and dilemmas to be dimensional and forget to give any defects at all; Rachel Stone’s one weakness being loyalty which in this case is akin to telling a new employer that your one deficiency is being a workaholic.
Co-starring Sophie Okonedo and Matthias Schweighöfer as members of Gadot’s Charter team, Alia Bhatt as one of the main antagonist super-hackers trying to steal The Heart technology, plus Glenn Close and BD Wong as members of a super-secret global generals cabal that are the architects of The Charter, none of the plot or details really matter as “Heart Of Stone,” is just too generic and familiar to ever really engage your interest. If one of the main criticisms of watching movies at home is that everyone watches them while on their phones, damn, if “Heart Of Stone” doesn’t feel like it was engineered to do just that and thus perhaps subconsciously extra-please the Netflix audience that maybe just wants to secretly be on their phone while they watch anyhow.
It’s practically a narrative streaming algorithm creating a movie that you don’t need to pay strict attention to enjoy and mostly understand: Gal Gadot kicks a lot of ass and is competent, intelligent, beautiful, and supremely adept.
Because while “Heart Of Stone” has some fleeting thrills and set pieces, on paper, even those are pretty unforgettable. The spy movie is grounded in absolutely nothing else to make you care other than the mild theme of Heart’s honor and ability to win people over.
In trying to appeal to everyone in global appeal, “Heart Of Stone” thus ends up attracting no one and is just bland and characterless. And to o overdo the hackneyed theme and to end with additional soon-to-be cliches in a movie riddled with them, “Heart Of Stone” does feel like it’s sprung from an A.I. synthesizer. The screenplay (by Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder) ably arranges all the espionage elements in one familiar place but fails to give them any authenticity, character, flavor, specificity, soul, and yes, heart, just like your average A.I. does on the regular. “Heart Of Stone” purports to have characters made of sturdy, gritty, golden, unbreakable stuff, but that’s a tagline, not a movie or story; it’s really just flimsy work easily tossed off and broken as it tumbles into the ever-filling bin of barely-one-use Netflix movies. [D+]