Film Review — Heart of Stone
Gal Gadot’s spy franchise starter is a derivative disaster.
A skilled intelligence operative races to stop a hacker from stealing a powerful AI weapon.
★☆☆☆☆
As Heart of Stone switches to an exotic new location midway through its first act, we get a pleasant aerial shot of a sun-kissed Lisbon, accompanied by the familiar shimmering synths of Fleetwood Mac’s enduring 1987 hit, “Everywhere”.
It’s a classic bop, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. But as the song shifts from the foreground to the background of a radio in a van containing Gal Gadot and her team of elite spies, it’s immediately dismissed by Jamie Dornan’s hunky spook as old and uncool.
An unintended self-own for sure, it’s also one of the rare moments where Heart of Stone threatens to come close to anything resembling passable entertainment.
Netflix and Skydance’s decision to release Gadot’s franchise hopeful so soon after the latest Mission Impossible is a real headscratcher. Tom Cruise’s long-running spy series — coincidentally produced by the aforementioned Skydance — also features a similar plot concerning an omnipotent AI that threatens the world.
But Dead Reckoning’s unoriginal story is more than made up for by thrilling action sequences, incredible stunt work, practical effects over digital where possible, and suspense driven by the feeling that whatever buzzword-y MacGuffin Cruise and team are chasing this time is a genuine threat.
Heart of Stone has none of this. It’s an infuriatingly poor movie, a collection of tired tropes, cliches and contrivances slapped together by the human equivalent of ChatGPT.
The action, a hodgepodge of Bourne and modern Bond’s gritty aesthetic, is edited like a music video to try and hide just how dull it is. Anything that threatens to raise a pulse comes with a cheap CGI sheen that, along with the film’s incessant attempts at MCU-esque humour, immediately kills any building tension.
The film’s centrepiece action sequence, a laughably unrealistic fight scene taking place in a vaguely hi-tech setting, looking like something out of Babylon 5, features special effects of a quality that honestly wouldn’t look out of place in a SyFy original from 2008.
Gadot is a talented actor in the same way Arnold Schwarzenegger was back in the eighties. What she packs in looks and kickass capabilities, she, unfortunately, lacks in natural charisma. It’s a quality that’s essential to make a film about a globe-trotting master of deception work.
The rest of the cast disappoints too. Dornan is wasted, Alia Bhatt (RRR) is unconvincing as an elusive hacker, Matthias Schweighöfer (Oppenheimer) is purely there to deliver endless banal exposition that only succeeds in insulting the audience’s intelligence.
Talented screen veterans Glenn Close and Sophie Okonedo sleepwalk through their roles to the extent you wonder if they even knew the name of the film they were appearing in. The lone highlight, Paul Ready, reminds us that the hilarious sitcom, Motherland, is the only thing worth keeping Netflix for.
Heart of Stone is eye-rolling, leg-shaking, toe-curling and fist-balling-ly bad. 123 mind-numbingly awful minutes that felt like an eternity trapped in shit film purgatory. This isn’t a film as art, it’s mere content for content’s sake, a pitch for a whole series of half-baked, half-assed, derivative slop from Netflix’s endless conveyor of creatively bankrupt “entertainment”.
It’ll probably be a hit.
Originally published at michaelkenny.uk
