Yep, another day, seemingly means yet another Netflix action/spy thriller led by a superhero actor lands on the streaming site only a short time after Quentin Tarantino blasted such features in a recent interview. To give the dude his due, he’s not exactly wrong, as the majority of the site’s home-made features have indeed tended to be somewhat disposable affairs with such expensive offerings such as The Grey Man and Red Notice barely sticking in the memory long after the algorithm force feeds you some more alternatives.
Well, now its Gal Gadot’s turn as she dons the mantle of undercover super-spy, Rachel Stone, as she seeks to thwart global evil doers in a style that’s heavily remincent of a Mission: Impossible movie fused with the glib smirk of a Pierce Brosnan era Bond film – hell, it even comes complete with it’s own, Maurice Binder inspired title sequence. Can she save the free world and the reputation of Netflix funded action/thrillers in the face of my growing apathy?
Heart Of Stone is a spy movie that starts much like many other spy movies insofar that it begins with a bunch of spies already in the midst of some spying. An MI6 team lead by Irish, dashing, Bond-a-like, Parker is in the Swiss Alps hoping to smoke out a rogue arms dealer along with fellow field agent Yang while the amiable Bailey and shy noob, Rachel, provide tech support. However, when the mission tanks, one of these spies proves to be not like the others when Rachel, who in actuality is a plant for super-secret peace keeping organisation called the Charter, who ranks their sleeper agents like playing cards and can predict terrorist acts with their secret weapon, a computer algorithm called the Heart, breaks cover and saves the day without any of her teammates realising.
However, while she managed to technically save the day, the arms dealer they were sent to apprehend ingests some cyanide before he can be pumped for information and thus she gets a chewing out, not only from her handlers at MI6, but from her real bosses at Charter.
However, during the mission, Rachel noticed a strange woman watching her in the casino who turns out to be a savant hacker called Keya and it raised questions about whether something big was coming down the pipe. Her pipe-based suspicions are soon confirmed when it’s revealed that her MI6 team has another plant in it besides her who has been trying to draw out a Charter agent for their own nefarious means.
Due to the typical types of bitter pasts cinematic spies seem to have, this turncoat has their treacherous eyes on destroying Charter and obtaining the Heart with the aid of Keya with the hope of changing the old world order. With the future predicting Heart out of action, can Rachel use her honed spy instincts to save the day?
While I’m all for Hollywood making full-on attempts to craft a female super-spy on the level of Bond, Bourne or Ethan Hunt, the only one in my mind that’s come close to succeeding is Angelina Jolie’s 2010 thriller, Salt, that frustratingly never got a sequel. Since then all subsequent attempts have even been too dark to sequalize (The Rythm Section, Red Sparrow) too left field to properly catch on (Atomic Blonde, The 335) or just a bit shit and sadly, Heart Of Stone falls into the third category.
Kudos have to be given for the balls needed to make a spy film that’s weirdly jaunty in the same vein as the lighter Bond movies, but while you suspect director Tom Harper had either a post-modern The Spy Who Loved Me or even Goldfinger in mind, he’s instead wildly undershot and given us Moonraker and Die Another Day instead. Presumably feeding off Gal Gadot’s “let’s love each other” attitude, we have secret agents who yearn to belong, dance to Lizzo despite the fact they could be killed at any moment and chill out at the chippie after work. However, if you’re going to make your unkillable agent as relatable as something out of Killing Eve and then make your central agent something of a big hearted softie, your tone had better measure up.
Regrettably, Heart Of Stone doesn’t and while kindly spies who cherish life aren’t exactly that rare (Ethan Hunt also treats his teams like extended family), it weirdly mis-translates here that everyone is either horribly naive or worse, completely rubbish at their job.
Gadot drifts through the movie like the ethereal gazelle-woman she is, but beside her diligently putting in the physical work, Rachael Stone remains something of an enigma who chooses to be a bit nice. Elsewhere, Jaime Dornan delivers his standard line of Irish brooding before the status quo violently shifts and Matthias Schweighöfer gets to play with Minortiy Report’s CGI virtual screens a lot while loud shouting out details Stone (and thus the audience) needs to know during the fast paced action. However most of the supporting cast, including Alia Bhatt’s untrustworthy hacker and Paul Ready’s cat loving tech, are kind of annoying and despite their various fates, you’ll care less about them than you would do the average teen in a slasher flick or a nameless sentry in a war film. However, worst of all, the film manages the ridiculous feat of making the presence of both Sophie Okonedo and Glen Close feel like an utter non-event which is just wrong.
Still, at least the action makes up for it, right? Uh, no – it doesn’t actually, as Heart Of Stone’s more adrenaline fueled moments sort of whizz past while making less of an impact than a cotton wool wrecking ball. The opening scene which sees Stone try to maintain her cover while utilising a parachute, a zip line and a ski-bike to race to the bottom of a mountain to take out some goons waiting to waste Parker is rambunctious enough, but it carries no emotional weight because we don’t know who any of these people really are yet. Later on, a battle on a weird looking satellite/blimp thing that turns into a impromptu skydiving race, suffers by being awkwardly reminiscent of both The Rockets and Black Widow and the rest of the crashy, bangy moments all fade into insignificance when compared to virtually anything the Mission: Impossible series has done.
So it seems that yet another hopeful spy series has fallen foul of the Netflix curse (not everything can be as viscerally stunning as Extraction, I guess) as it churns out yet another disposable entry in its lackluster action library.
This is one streaming secret agent that probably shouldn’t have bothered breaking cover.
🌟🌟
We Have Issues 