Heart of Stone
NETFLIX
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist. \
The Cannongroupification of Netflix will continue until morale improves. Their latest mega-budget fake movie that everyone will allegedly watch worldwide and then forget two weeks from now, Heart of Stone, solidifies the streamer as the modern-day version of The Cannon Group. Whereas Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus would craft blockbusters they thought represented “real” American values while attempting to jumpstart as many franchises as possible – remember when they tried to make Michael Dudikoff a thing with the American Ninja movies? – Ted Sarandos and Netflix believe they can achieve the same success with the biggest Hollywood blockbusters by amalgamating the best movies ever made inside a blender and feed it to their ever-growing algorithm.
Enter Heart of Stone, which begins by riffing countless James Bond movies (from the Alps-inspired opening scene harkening back to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, For Your Eyes Only and, most recently, Spectre to the Shirley Bassey-esque opening credits sequence) and slowly morphs into a Mission: Impossible spinoff. Hell, even the music beats during a motorcycle chase scene between the film’s protagonist, Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot), and a henchman dubbed “The Blond” (played by model Jon Kortajarena) is an almost carbon copy of the motorcycle chase between Ethan Hunt and Ilsa Faust from Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.
The film isn’t even subtle in their ripoffs – the wingsuit jump is an aesthetic recreation of Mission: Impossible - Fallout’s HALO jump, with slight modifications. The Charter (the secret agency Stone works for)’s multiple Kings (played here by Sophie Okonedo, BD Wong, Glenn Close, and Mark Ivanir) are variants of M from James Bond and the “Jack of Hearts” (Matthias Schweighöfer) is the film’s Q. All that’s left now is an antagonist that rivals the likes of James Bond and Mission: Impossible.
Lucky for the audience, the film has two (!) antagonists, Parker (Jamie Dornan), who is revealed early on in the film as a double agent working with hacker Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt, in her Hollywood debut). Parker seems more in line with a villain someone would find in a Daniel Craig Bond film, while Keya lives in a moral grey area between “good” and “bad.” This film’s version of early-stage Ilsa Faust from Mission: Impossible. The two attempts to steal an AI device call “The Heart,” which can control the world and predict all possible outcomes for their agents. Basically, “The Entity” from Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning - Part One, but far less developed and interesting.
Keya wants to use “The Heart” to take down the man who abused and killed their parents, while Parker has a more nefarious agenda he, of course, does not tell Keya. It’s now up to Stone to take both villains down before innocent people die. It’s been a while since Hollywood wanted Gadot to lead an action franchise in a post-Wonder Woman world, with Red Notice and Heart of Stone, but it’s not working out for her. Gadot is an impossibly beautiful star with a radiant screen presence but lacks any charm and sense of timing to make her performances work. She doesn’t seem to have the energy to accompany the movie’s multiple high-stakes action sequences, and the switch between her “stunts” (behind a green screen) to a stunt double is extremely apparent. Gadot doesn’t seem to infuse her action-movie roles with any personality and brings absolutely nothing to the table to at least make Rachel Stone stand out among the most iconic spy film characters of all time.
She has little chemistry with Dornan; even Bhatt, one of the biggest Indian stars in the world, is wasted in her first Hollywood appearance. It’s seemingly clear that director Tom Harper hasn’t watched a single film starring Bhatt. Her recent string of performances in S.S. Rajamouli’s Oscar-winning RRR, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi, and most recently in Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani show how incredibly versatile and skillful of an actor she is. She even showed some blockbuster readiness in Ayan Mukerji’s Brahmastra Part One: Shiva. It would be the biggest shame for her Hollywood debut to be a pitiful waste and not at least interest viewers in seeking out Bhatt’s previous works. And yet, her character arc is not only amazingly predictable but does nothing to bring out the best of Bhatt’s talents as one of the best and most impactful stars working today.
The rest of the cast aligns with the same feeling: they try their best to salvage a poorly-written script and underdeveloped arcs that only reference other spy films but never at least expand on the characters or designs its world as a unique one with actual franchise potential. It also doesn’t help that few action scenes are entertaining, save for an enthralling parachute jump involving Bhatt’s Keya and Gadot’s Stone. Apart from that, most of the action is uninterestingly shot and haphazardly edited, as if Harper and cinematographer George Steel don’t want anyone to see and appreciate the action, even if its budget is massive for a production like this to take advantage of its expansive vistas and huge scale.
But here’s the thing: its scale always feels small because the threat is barely developed, no one knows what “The Heart” controls, and why the Charter exists as an important quasi-surveillance agency. Nothing is developed past spy movie clichés, which this movie is a walking and talking bible of them.
It feels like screenwriters Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder painstakingly adapted “Spy Films for Dummies” instead of jumpstarting an exciting franchise for Netflix, à la Extraction. The streamer will gaslight the press in thinking it’s a massive success for the company – without showing journalists actual viewing numbers – and greenlight three sequels as of next week. But who will remember having seen Heart of Stone in two days from now? It’s yet another cog in the Netflix algorithm…