Heart of Stone
Dirigible-obsessed director returns with "Heart of Stone."
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I enjoy espionage movies. I think Gal Gadot’s great. On paper Netflix’s “Heart of Stone” (hitting the streamer on Friday, Aug. 11) should be my bag, but it just ain’t.
Gadot stars as Rachel Stone, an operative for a shadowy, peacekeeping organization known as The Charter. Rachel’s working undercover as a techie with an MI6 team comprised of Parker (Jamie Dornan), Theresa Yang (Jing Lusi) and Max Bailey (Paul Ready) to ensure their operation against arms dealer Mulvaney (Enzo Cilenti) goes off without a hitch.
Alas, a hitch arises and a powerful MacGuffin of a digital weapon known as “The Heart” winds up in the hands of Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt, “RRR”), a hacker with an axe to grind. Rachel must collaborate with her colleagues at The Charter – among them Nomad (Sophie Okonedo), Jack of Hearts (Matthias Schweighöfer, he played Werner Heisenberg in “Oppenheimer”) and Ivo (Archie Madekwe, so good in the upcoming “Gran Turismo” and so underused here) – to ensure a worldwide cataclysmic event doesn’t ensue.
“Heart of Stone” is directed by Tom Harper (“The Aeronauts”) and scripted by Greg Rucka (“The Old Guard”) and Allison Schroeder (“Hidden Figures”). I’d say qualitatively the picture skews closer to Harper’s previous work as opposed to those of Rucker or Schroeder. “The Aeronauts” was somehow both dry and plasticine whereas “The Old Guard” and “Hidden Figures” are subversive and transgressive texts seeking to better the lives of women, people of color and queer individuals.
“Heart of Stone” doesn’t have such lofty ambitions. This is mostly just a series of action set pieces in which Gadot does her thing in front of green screens. She’s lovely and certainly capable in action (if not arguably a tad too cool for school), but there’s no weight or gravity to anything occurring on screen. This is the anti-Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” … another Skydance Media production. “Heart of Stone” more closely resembles Skydance’s Apple TV+ offering “Ghosted” (my review here) from earlier this year in that it’s almost entirely artifice. My biggest takeaway from the picture is that between this and “The Aeronauts” Harper really seems to have a thing for dirigibles. I would bet good money his favorite band is Led Zeppelin.
“Heart of Stone” may very well be the Netflixiest Netflix Original Film to ever Netflix Original Film … that is to say it’s entertaining enough (barely) but entirely disposable. And this is coming from a dude who adored prior Netflix/Skydance collaborations including the aforementioned “The Old Guard” and “The Adam Project.” Your mission should you choose to accept it is to do with this opinion what you will.