## Title: Heart Of Stone 2023
## Runtime: 2h 2min
## Genre: Action Crime Thriller
## Short: An intelligence operative for a shadowy global peacekeeping agency races to stop a hacker from stealing its most valuable and dangerous weapon.
## Director: Tom Harper
## Writers: Greg Rucka, Allison Schroeder
## Stars: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt
## Storyline: Rachel Stone may be a operator cum specialist who works beside a group of MI 6 field specialists. The mission is to find the "heart" an AI empowered computer which has the capability of hacking into any computer program and might cause impressive devastation ought to it drop into the off-base hands. Keya, a youthful lady is an Indian computer master who is joined to another syndicate. Circumstances bring Rachel and Keya together and they realize that they have a common mission. They at that point group up to avoid the "heart" from falling within the off-base hands.
## Review: This film definitely has its heart in the right place. Pretty cool action coupled with predictable character arcs (especially for Keya) make this an okay watch. Needless to say, the action is really good for a Netflix film, and some moments are worked out quite well. The plot is quite predictable and does leave room for more in the series to appear. Are films becoming series now?
Heart of Stone was the first episode, and on and on and on. The refreshing aspect of the film was that the female characters didn’t know everything from the start, weren’t on top of all situations, and had to fight (a little bit) to get what they wanted. It’s better than what Marvel did with Miss Marvel and She Hulk or what Amazon Studios did with Rings of Power. It makes sense on multiple levels to cast Alia. Firstly, her prominence in Bollywood and India being a big market for Netflix.
Secondly, casting somebody as famous as PC for this role would have been difficult, as it would have become a star fight between Gal Gadot and PC. And thirdly, the character needed an early 20s look, which Alia pulls off even though it feels like the movie was shot during her pregnancy. Gal Gadot is good at carrying the film on her shoulders. (This film definitely felt better than Red Notice.) This film and action have pretty good dialogue, have Alia and Gal Gadot, and definitely have a heart.
A self-conscious effort to build a spy franchise around Gal Gadot, Heart of Stone plays like a poor woman’s Mission Impossible, mostly thwarting even its star’s (see what I did there?) charisma. Despite some okay action moments scattered over its overly long two-hour runtime, this latest Netflix film plays like an inoffensive but lifeless addition to the “You might like” feature that, alas, you probably won’t! Now, it’s certainly not a bad film by any means, but it is one of those films that we’ve all seen before and done a lot better!
The film comes across as yet another film stitched together from parts of other, better films. By that measure, even if “Heart” is in the right place, it’s the other pieces that feel a bit out of whack! Heart of Stone capitalizes on Gadot’s inherent likability without bringing enough distinctive elements to this exercise to make it feel like much more than a Mission Impossible wannabe! Heart of Stone joins the streaming service’s seemingly endless stable of star-driven action films, but it does little to differentiate itself.
There’s no big action sequence or even a single moment that merits any sort of feeling other than déjà vu! If you didn’t know better, you could easily mistake Heart of Stone for the first big film made entirely by artificial intelligence. This thrill-less spy thriller is full of wooden dialogue that no human has ever actually said (except on screen in another film!), with most of its action scenes and plot points recycled from other, better blockbusters and executed with far less skill.
Another weak point of the film is the character and performance played by Alia Bhatt, who makes her Hollywood debut here. I don’t know what it was, but I just couldn’t believe her in this role at all! She was uninteresting as a character and, in my opinion, gave one of the weaker performances in the film. Overall, while I didn’t hate the film as much as seemingly everyone else, I still found Heart of Stone to have wasted potential. The thing is, Netflix is capable of delivering solid action films like the Extraction films, but then they give us something like this... A generic and pretty lifeless film!
Official Trailer: