Heart of Stone (Netflix, 2023)
Gal Gadot is the star of the American action-thriller Heart of Stone, which is produced by Skydance, the movie studio behind the Mission: Impossible films.
Gadot plays Rachel Stone, an intelligence operative for MI6. But that’s just her cover. She secretly works for a shadow agency called The Charter, that manifests itself as a global peacekeeper, putting out fires all over the world.
Their most valuable and dangerous weapon is called The Heart, ‘ a quantum computer that can hack into anything, everywhere’ and it is so powerful that it can crash both airplanes and the stock market.
Problems arise when genius hacker Keya (Alia Bhatt) sets her sights on The Heart and Rachel & Co. have to travel all over the world, from Portugal to Senegal and Iceland, which leads to a bunch of spectacular chases and shootings.
Gadot is obviously the main draw here, due to the success of Wonder Woman and Red Notice. Her co-stars include Jamie Dornan (Fifty Shades of Grey, Belfast) while Alia Bhatt, who is one of the most popular Bollywood-stars in the world, is making her Hollywood debut in this movie. The cast is rounded out by great actors like Sophie Okonedo, Mathias Schweighofer and even Glenn Close.
Heart of Stone is written by Greg Rucka (The Old Guard) and Allison Schroeder (Hidden Figures) and directed by Tom Harper, who previously made a name for himself with the musical drama Wild Rose (2018), starring Jessie Buckley.
It’s obvious from the start that Heart of Stone is meant to launch a female led franchise for Netflix in the vein of the Mission: Impossible series.
As such it more or less gets the job done. Is it as good as the recent Dead Reckoning? Obviously not. But it’s entertaining in its own right. The money is mostly on the screen and even though the script is highly derivative the whole affair is fun enough to satisfy your (or, at least, my) bi-monthly M:I and/or James Bond needs.
On the other hand, I get it if people are saying that’s setting the bar too low. While watching I not once had the idea ‘I need to see this in a theater.’
Heart of Stone is the kind of movie you watch on Sunday morning (or afternoon) in bed with a hangover, after a drunken (and hopefully great) night on the town.
Here’s the trailer: