This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Netflix’s latest action film, Heart of Stone, follows Gal Gadot in the role of Rachel Stone, a secret agent working for the mysterious organization “The Charter”. The Charter possesses a device called “The Heart”, a hyper-intelligent quantum computer that can be used for anything, to hack anything, and can even use probability statistics at such an advanced level to predict the future. This makes it potentially the most powerful weapon in the world, and with it are people who want to use it for no good.
Now the idea of the film is pretty interesting, I’ll give the film that. However, I was very much underwhelmed by the execution of the film’s plot. The film dragged on in areas it didn’t need to, and plot points were used and then disregarded like it was nothing. There is even a massive twist about 40 minutes into the film that advances the plot in a new direction, but was totally unnecessary, felt really forced and then everything that was established up to that point was disregarded for the rest of the film.
It makes for a jarring watch that goes in simultaneous directions with no feel for the story until over an hour in, inflating the runtime massively to a bloated 2 hours.
The action, however, of Heart of Stone is actually pleasant to watch. Good fight choreography, creative set pieces and numerous fight scenes at least hold my attention if I disregard the story. In addition, the settings the film goes through are beautiful, and it was obvious they cared about where they shot the film.
What really hurts Heart of Stone is HOW they shoot it. Over 75% of the film is shot at night or in darkness. And normally this wouldn’t be a problem except that you can barely see anything a majority of the time on screen. It’s all so dark that I ended up watching just black instead of what’s actually going on. It was a bizarre choice that wasn’t necessary at all for this film.
In addition, the acting here just really feels lackluster. Jamie Dornan is your stereotypical villain type without any unique qualities, the agents of “The Charter” are just completely forgettable, and Alia Bhatt tries her best, but isn’t given much to succeed on. Gal Gadot, however, is the worst offender of the cast. I just don’t know how she is an in-demand actress. Her performance is dull, lifeless and really doesn’t feel believable at all. This is a trend I have found in all of her performances. It leaves me to wonder how she continues to get leading roles when, frankly, she can’t act.
There was potential for Heart of Stone, and in fact some interesting concepts lay underneath the surface. Yet, for each interesting one, there is a half-baked stereotypical action concept or some absolutely bonkers ideas that just take me out of it. Case in point being right in the film’s cold open, where they infiltrate a gambling ring and find out they are betting on military operations and real time military kills as if military operations just have a camera crew following them around. It’s absurd and just sucks.
Final Thoughts
While Heart of Stone had potential, it winds up just being another average, stereotypical Netflix action film. Lackluster performances, confusing story beats and bad cinematography litter the film. At least the action sequences are good. It really just leaves me wondering why Netflix keeps bankrolling these bad action flicks. They obviously don’t do well, and I would much rather see them use their massive amounts of money to give to films with cool concepts or to indie dramas who could really use the budget to tell a really compelling story. But until that happens, all we can expect is more Netflix action movie clones.
