Heart of Stone
M, 123 minutes. Netflix
2 stars
Star Gal Gadot was one of the producers of this action spy movie that seems intended to launch another Mission: Impossible-style franchise. I'm not sure that will, or should, happen.
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Not that the idea of a female action series is bad, of course, but Heart of Stone, while a mildly diverting way to spend a couple of hours, doesn't feel like it will be the start of one.
The set-up, a pre-credit sequence a la James Bond, seems promising.
In the Italian Alps, three MI6 agents - Parker (Jamie Dornan), Bailey (Paul Ready) and Yang (Jing Lusi) - are preparing to extract an arms dealer, Mulvaney (Enzo Cilenti). Rachel Stone (Gadot) is a support technician - her role, while important, is not in the field.
Inevitably, things go awry - there's gunplay and a fight aboard a cable car - and the mission fails. But what we learn and the MI6 agents don't is that Stone is, in fact, a member of The Charter (even speaking it seems to be in near-reverential capital letters to emphasise its importance). Her codename is Nine of Hearts.
The Charter is one of those supersecret international organisations that works to keep peace and order in the world, existing outside, possibly above, governments.
It uses The Heart (also to be spoken With Capitals), a superduper predictive AI quantum computer that can hack into any digital device anywhere (making one feel that living an analogue, off-grid life might not be such a bad idea).
The leaders of The Charter include characters played by B.D. Wong and Glenn Close, which some might find reassuring, though they aren't in the movie for long.
Stone almost blows her cover trying to help in the operation and is reprimanded by her Charter superior Nomad (Sophie Okonedo). She's very experienced and good at what she does but she still lets pesky things like feelings interfere with her work.
Then the team is sent on another mission, this time to Lisbon, pursuing hacker Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt), whom Stone saw in the Alps and who is presumed to be up to no good.
The action ranges widely, from freefall drops out of aeroplanes to trekking across the African desert, to a hand-to-hand fight in an airship (which, incredibly, is powered by hydrogen: does nobody remember the Hindenburg disaster?).
While there is some less-than-perfect special effects work, the film has other, more serious problems.
Jon Kortajarena makes a strong visual impression as The Blond, one of the evil henchmen, though he doesn't have all that much to do (sort of like Boba Fett in the original Star Wars trilogy). The main actors are fine but nobody really stands out.
While there is some less-than-perfect special effects work, given how good the state of the art is and how picky audiences are, it's not worth making too much of a fuss. The film has other, more serious problems.
Heart of Stone is riddled with would-be witty banter and chunks of clumsy expository dialogue. It's also so laden with cliches you could make a drinking game out of them. To name a few: there's the stood-down agent who goes rogue, the revelation that someone is not who they appeared to be, a group of people identified by codenames, and a ruthless big bad villain with a grandiose scheme who talks about it to someone instead of simply killing them. There are more, so be warned. Bottoms up!