HEART OF STONE (2023) – Another big budget action junk from Netflix
Rating: ⭐

Gal Gadot is one of my favorite actresses in Hollywod today. She truly has screen presence and is the embodiment of what a super star should be. Beauty and brawn! However, Gal Gadot should stop accepting role in all these poorly conceived big budget action movies as I do find it painful to watch her in such rubbish. Heart of Stone is sadly even worse than her last Netflix movie Red Notice. On paper, this looks like an ambitious project to kick start a new spy action series with the likes of James Bond and Mission Impossible. Gal Gadot plays superspy Rachel Stone who works for a mysterious peace keeping operation called The Charter. The opening gambit attempts to establish her as a sort of female equivalent of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible series. She works with a team that utilises state of art technology while she has impeccable skills in getting out of tight impossible situations. In between the team members exchange lighthearted dialouge oblivious to the death threatening scenarios that unfolds.
The action sequences and stunts are shot without any sense of imagination and probably deliberately in dark environment to avoid the need to show details. The plot and dialogue looks and sounds like they were generated by a computer based on the hundreds of films that Hollywood generate in the genre. There is nary a moment that does not feel familiar and gives the viewers that “I have seen this before” feeling. Director Tom Harper directs this like it is on auto-drive mode.
The performances of the supporting characters are all unremarkable and forgettable. Even the villain of the show, is weakly depicted. The generic quality of the whole project extends to even the soundtrack music that accompanies the action scenes. Like everything else here, they sound like a poor copy of something we have experienced before in better movies. Stay far far away from this piece of junk and hopefully the failure of this movie will prevent any future chapters in the series to be made.