REVIEW: Heart of Stone (2023)

Movie Reviews

What is the ratio of times you’ve really enjoyed a Netflix movie vs. times you’ve cursed yourself for starting one? It’s got to be around 1:100, right? I mean, on the good side, there’s The Irishman, both Extractions, and The Gray Man until the last ten or fifteen minutes destroyed it. The bad side is an Everest of garbage, to which we can now add Heart of Stone, Gal Gadot’s attempt to start a franchise that isn’t Wonder Woman. And it’s awful, a seemingly endless trudge through dull action, corny dialogue, characters lifted from a spy movie trope list, and a plot that feels like note cards were stolen from random writers’ rooms and placed haphazardly on a board.

Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) is an agent working for Charter, an independent spy organization so secret that it spies on other spies. While embedded in an MI6 team, she gets wind of a computer hacker leading a group of terrorists trying to steal something we don’t learn about till halfway through. But once the villains’ goal is revealed, Stone finds her own organization under attack.

The opening sequence of Heart of Stone is essentially the approach the writers took to the whole movie; it throws various action set pieces at you relentlessly in the hopes you won’t notice how dumb and empty the story and characters are. This is Mission: Impossible territory, with a British Intelligence team staking out and trying to lift an arms dealer in a casino atop the Alps. Everyone’s got their part to play, but the second the movie needs to shift gears, that all goes out the window, and everyone is in action mode. There’s no coherence to it, no sense of who the team members are or how they work together. Heart of Stone attempts this, but it fails miserably, offering one-note nonsense like the electronics expert who likes cats or the team leader who likes a certain type of music I can’t identify but I think is supposed to suggest clubbing. We’re meant to think they’re a tight-knit group of friends, but they’re so robotic and superficially drawn that it never comes together.

The same is true of everyone in Heart of Stone. Aside from Gal Gadot, who is supposed to be ruled by her heart rather than the cold logic of intelligence work (the heart of Stone… yeah, this isn’t exactly a thinker), they all exist to deliver information to Stone and the audience, come up with an awful one-liner so we think everyone is cool, and then disappear till they’re needed again. The actors are uniformly devoid of charisma; they don’t feel like real people but don’t pop like a movie set in a heightened reality would need them to pop, either. The villains are dullsville squared, never feeling like much of a threat (especially the laughably toothless hacker, who looks like she’s cutting class to fit in with the cool kids). A scene around the midpoint of the film reveals a couple of cameos as some of the heads of Charter, but they have nothing to do, no good lines, and are wasted on characters that could have been played the cheapest extra on set.

That leaves action, and Heart of Stone has a decent amount, but it’s the new style of CGI sequences that are so obvious they never convince you anyone is in danger. A motorcycle chase is so phony-looking you laugh instead of cheer when Stone accidentally takes out a bad guy. Shoot-outs have all the energy of those old point-and-click games. Director Tom Harper has no eye for this stuff, and the action scenes are as boring as the character moments between them. The movie is also derivative as hell, with plot points lifted from much better spy movies left and right, especially James Bond films. There’s a jump off a mountain with a parachute (remember The Spy Who Loved Me?), a mid-air fight for control of another parachute (remember Moonraker?), a traitor who was left for dead after an explosion on a mission and wants revenge (remember Goldeneye?), and on and on. A car chase in Lisbon actually tries to mimic “Bim Bam Smash,” the John Powell track from the car chase in The Bourne Supremacy. You’d think with all this pilfering, Heart of Stone would eventually get something right.

Adding to the sense of apathy Heart of Stone engenders is the AI plot device. Charter is run entirely by AI, and it’s an all-knowing Nostradamus thing that can tell you anything you want to know at any time, calculate the odds of someone surviving a fight, and control everything on Earth. It’s stupid, of course, but it also alienates the audience. This isn’t just about Heart of Stone; the new Mission: Impossible has the same problem, albeit buoyed by a better movie. Spy films are turning into science fiction now, and while this complaint has existed for a long time, they used at least be somewhat believable. Yeah, Moonraker took James Bond into space, but it was on a space station via a shuttle, not with some all-knowing magic computer that does everyone’s thinking for them. MacGuffins used to be microfilm containing submarine plans, computer disks with lists of undercover agents on them, or even missing nukes – big stakes, but still tangible and something people can understand on a gut level. Watching these characters interact with something that looks like the AI Tony Stark was playing with in Age of Ultron is too far, and it removes any investment in a spy story.

And there is nothing about Heart of Stone in which to invest. It’s full of bad characters played poorly, a sci-fi plot that barely holds together, listless action, spell-breaking CGI, and at least thirty minutes of excess running time. This is the kind of movie that demands you pop something you love into the Blu-ray player immediately afterwards to remind yourself that movies are sometimes worth it. Your favorite spy film would probably be a good palate cleanser.