Following in the footsteps of Extraction, Red Notice, and The Grey Man, Heart of Stone arrives as this year’s entry into the mostly inglorious ‘Netflix action movie/franchise-starter’ pantheon. Where each of its (generally not great) predecessors had a sort-of USP, though (Extraction’s long-take action, The Grey Man’s ultra-starry cast, Red Notice being one of the worst films ever made), Heart of Stone has nothing to make it memorable. A globe-trotting spy vs AI caper with very high stakes but very low emotional engagement, it’s not the worst film of 2023, but it is certainly the most generic.
Gal Gadot stars as Rachel Stone (get it?), a super-skilled secret agent who works for a mysterious international spy service called the Charter, assisted in its world-saving endeavours by an all-powerful AI assistant known as The Heart (get it??). While on a poorly explained undercover assignment at MI6, Stone finds herself in the crosshairs of young but ingenious hacker Keya (Bollywood star Alia Bhatt), who knows exactly who Stone really is and aims to take control of the Heart, putting every computer-controlled piece of information and infrastructure on earth at risk.
The world is on the line, then, but you never feel all that much urgency at any point in Heart of Stone. Director Tom Harper does fit a few neat ideas into the grander set-pieces, like a night-time mountain descent with a fluorescent parachute, and the film at least has the good grace to spend its reportedly hefty budget on a series of lavish international locations, but the fistfights and shootouts that pepper the film are completely mediocre. There’s nothing that really gets the blood pumping, while the script from Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder is dull and flat, with some truly excruciating (though thankfully rare) attempts at humour.
It doesn’t help that Gadot, yet again, is a wooden presence in the lead. Bhatt has a bit more fun, and Jamie Dornan is solid enough as a driven and serious MI6 agent with a checkered past, but the performances here are never actually *good*, a problem that starts right at the top of the call sheet. In the promotion for this film, Gadot has talked up how this series could become a female-led competitor to the Bonds, Bournes, and Missions Impossible of the action film world, but those franchises, on top of their superior action, all manage to have characters you’re willing to root for across multiple films – Heart of Stone does not.
Sometimes, with their big films, Netflix grant a cinema-only release for a week or so before releasing them onto streaming. No such grace has been granted to Heart of Stone, and it’s not hard to see why. At its best it’s inoffensively entertaining, but this is pure background noise filmmaking, something designed to be glanced up at while the audience checks their phone. Given how Netflix handles viewing figures for these tentpole, I have no doubt that Heart of Stone will be proclaimed a great success and have a sequel greenlit within a week, but that’s about as long as anyone will remember it.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 