Heart of Stone Movie Review: Gal Gadot and Alia Bhatt Spar in This Unremarkable and Unimaginative Spy Flick (LatestLY Exclusive)

Heart of Stone Movie Review: In a year where action movies have thrived, Tom Harper’s Heart of Stone sticks out like a sore thumb. The Netflix spy-actioner is a bloated and hollow international adventure that is fixated on emulating the successes of earlier, legendary action pictures while failing to leave a mark of its own. As a result, it is entirely devoid of character. Not even the much-hyped leads could help in providing any kind of excitement, and perhaps that’s where Heart of Stone really does let itself down. Heart of Stone: Alia Bhatt Teaches Telugu to Co-star Gal Gadot During Film’s Promotion (Watch Video).

Heart of Stone chronicles around Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot), an agent working for the secret special ops group known as the Charter and currently being a double agent under the MI6. When the device known as the Heart, a superweapon with the power of controlling everything, is been stolen by Keya Dhawan, a hacker who wants to use it for her own vigilantism, Rachel must embark on a dangerous mission to find it before it can be used to cause chaos. And if you think this sounds similar to many of the action films released in the past (including the recently released MI7), then you would be right.

Heart of Stone is like an amalgamation of all the popular espionage series that have been released in the past. It has all the components of Mission: Impossible 1 through Mission: Impossible 6, as well as a little amount of Bond sprinkled in there. Never does it truly feel original, and that is perhaps what stops it from being memorable. Everything you see here has been done better before, so Heart of Stone ends up being without a distinct personality.

Gal Gadot plays Rachel Stone, the ideal agent. For better or worse, Gadot remains her usual self in the film, albeit does lack a certain personality to her. She isn't given much to do in the writing, and Stone basically comes out as your standard stoic action hero who will get the job done no matter what. One might even conclude that her feelings perfectly capture her last name – Stone. Jamie Dornan, who plays MI6 agent Parker, joins her. I won't give away too much about his character here, but they give one of the movie's more intriguing individuals the least amount of development.

Watch the Trailer for Heart of Stone:

However, all the talk has been around Bhatt’s upcoming big Hollywood debut, her performance as Keya is unquestionably one of her weakest to date. I never bought into Dhawan's tragic storyline of a hacker taking the weapon to seek revenge on her foes. The fact that Bhatt's line delivery sounds incredibly unnatural made it worse. You can see her trying to figure out on spot how to deliver her lines, and she constantly had me being taken out of the film. The side characters of the film such as Matthias Schweighofer’s Jack of Hearts are fun to watch on-screen, but don’t amount to anything more than expository tools.

There is some thrill to the action in Heart of Stone. Gadot's action-hero persona does come into play here, and the action sequences are grand even though they were once again influenced by some of the earlier, more popular action flicks. Particularly, a halo jump sequence had a strong Mission: Impossible - Fallout influence. The more close-quarters fighting there is, the more problematic the action becomes though. The hand-to-hand battle scenes have a shaky-cam vibe to them that makes things difficult to follow and prevents you from ever really getting a good sense of what's happening.

Heart of Stone does keep you engaged to the best it can, which is possibly its strongest asset; however, in the end, it doesn't amount to much more than a MacGuffin hunt. It just depicts the good guys and bad ones searching for a super weapon. There is no hook element in this story that will leave you wanting more. It collects all the action movie clichés and presents them to you in one package for two hours of viewing. Heart Of Stone: Director Tom Harper Calls Alia Bhatt A Formidable, Intelligent, Charismatic Talent.

Even the third act is over in a heartbeat. The whole thing comes off as a rush effort that might have benefited from more development, and by the time it was through, I had just written it off as another forgettable action movie. I had hoped for a little bit more given the team behind it, and I just walked away disappointed.

Final Thoughts

Heart of Stone is a forgettable rehash of old action films. The set pieces in the movie keep you entertained, but the performances of the leads make the story an unremarkable adventure that amounts to nothing more than a movie you would watch on a whim and then immediately forget about. Heart of Stone releases on Netflix on August 11.

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(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 11, 2023 09:06 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).