HEART OF STONE (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Heart of Stone, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2023

It's the routine of it all that underwhelms in Heart of Stone, a pretty typical espionage thriller with a few moments and ideas that suggest at least some level of creativity on the part of the filmmakers. They're little moments and unfulfilled ideas, but when dealing with something that seems to only aspire to basic competence, we should take what we get.

The first of those ideas comes in the person of our hero, an operative for MI6 named Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot), and yes, don't fret, because the other noun in the title becomes a plot point, too. She's the tech expert on a team of field agents, resigned to just sitting in the background and making sure all of the equipment and hacking needs of a mission are taken care of while her colleagues get to have all the fun.

That setup is a nicely clever subversion of expectations, since we know Gadot is capable of and known for being a more action-oriented movie star. Watching her stare at a computer screen, as teammates Parker (Jamie Dornan) and Yang (Jing Lusi) infiltrate a mountaintop casino in order to capture a notorious arms dealer, and be treated with kid gloves by the entire team, which also includes Bailey (Paul Ready), is kind of amusing, if only because the character seems like a counterintuitive use of Gadot's screen presence.

What happens, though, when a writer subverts a subversion? Well, it just falls back to the norm, of course, and such is what happens here. As it turns out, Rachel is skilled at much more than merely pecking away at a keyboard and navigating various command prompts. In fact, she's an even tougher, more experienced, and, well, secretive secret agent than her counterparts.

That's the silly—yet not at all treated as such—but mostly formulaic premise of this story. Rachel is part of a super-duper secret spy organization known as the Charter, which is made up of former intelligence agents from around the world who fill in the gaps left by more official intelligence services. Their rules and hierarchy, with a playing card-based numbering system that probably limits the number of agents the organization can have or confuses matters when there are inevitable doubles, are almost as impenetrable as its centerpiece bit of technology.

It's an artificially intelligent computer system called the Heart, which is capable of disseminating information and calculating probability to the point that it almost appears as if the computer can predict the future (The fact that this movie arrives so soon after a much better spy film about impossible missions basically had the same plot device is unfortunate, to say the least). Its calculations are interpreted by the Jack of Hearts (Matthias Schweighöfer), which leads to a fairly clever opening action sequence that has Rachel, with the help of some augmented-reality contact lenses, seeing the Heart's recommended path and course of action in real time—even as she's gliding, sliding, and snowmobiling down the side of a moutain.

The rest of the action never lives up to that introductory scene, and the remainder of the plot has the Charter trying to defend itself from tech whiz Keya (Alia Bhatt) and a clandestine villain, whose reveal is a bit of a shock (It also suggests that a certain agency really needs to up its vetting process). They want to steal the Heart for personal and nefarious ends, but after rescuing her MI6 team from the bad guys' henchmen and being suspended from the Charter, Rachel has to do it all on her own.

Yes, it's standard stuff, and for all of the hubbub about the marvels of the Heart, it is more of a MacGuffin for the characters to chase later. That means a globe-trotting hunt for the villains and the device, which is strangely housed in an outer-atmosphere dirigible that oddly contains the same design flaw that caused the most famous blimp disaster in history (One would think the Heart would be able to predict that possibility). It does at least lead to a pretty neat—and decidedly ridiculous—sequence of Rachel free-falling over the desert, fighting for control of a parachute, and being surrounded by plummeting piece of flaming debris. If that sounds a bit familiar, it probably is, but for a whole movie that comes across as being assembled based on decent-enough and already-done ideas, the scene still kind of works.

That can't quite be said of the movie as a whole, though, if only because, while putting together all of these conceits and plot pieces, the screenwriters, Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder, and director Tom Harper never establish an identity for the movie to call its own. Gadot remains a fine action hero, and some of the specifics within the plot and spectacle of Heart of Stone offer a bit of promise. Mostly, it's a generic action thriller with a couple of nifty hooks and riffs on familiar ideas, but that doesn't make it any less predictable, safe, and forgettable.

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