Heart of Stone has been one of the most anticipated films of the year, which was finally released on Netflix on August 11, 2023. The spy action thriller is directed by Tom Harper and the screenplay is written by Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder. It has a runtime of about 2 hours and 5 minutes.
The ensemble cast of the film includes Gal Gadot as Rachel Stone, Jamie Dornan as Parker, Alia Bhatt as Keya Dhawan, Sophie Okonedo as Nomad, Matthias Schweighöfer as Jack of Hearts, Jing Lusi as Theresa Yang, Paul Ready as Max Bailey, Jon Kortajarena, Archie Madekwe as Ivo and several others.
-Contains Spoilers-
Heart of Stone Review
We meet our characters in the middle of a secret mission, where they have to catch a wanted arms dealer, amidst the landscape of snowy mountains. Parker, Bailey and Yang are MI6 agents, while Rachel Stone is the tech person, who doesn’t go out on the fields. Little do they know that Stone is actually an undercover agent of a highly secretive peacekeeping organisation ‘Charter’, which nobody knows about. They have an extraordinary technology called “The Heart” with the help of which they can access anything on the planet, and usually used it to analyse the success rate of their missions.
However, things go wrong while trying to catch the arms dealer and even Stone had to jeopardise her identity to save the teammates, whom she should never get attached – as instructed by the head of Charter. The team comes across an external anomaly, who infiltrates their connection and urges them to find out more about it. That’s when we meet Keya Dhawan, a prodigy from Pune, who was trained to fight but went rebel recently.
She wants to get her hands on ‘The Heart’ and then control the world or bring justice to her loved ones, exploited by the person who groomed her. However, the more Stone tries to catch Keya, she finds herself and her team in a grave situation where her identity and life are on the line. There’s also a Ken doll-looking villain (Jon Kortajarena), whom we never get to know or his agenda, except seeing him chase and shoot the secret agents.
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The first thing that throws me off right from the start is how the dialogue sound so robotic. As if an AI had been tasked with writing a funny banter between a friendly team and it did its best but the outcome is just squeezed out of any human emotion. And they just talk way too much before doing anything. The creators have served up all the character background story, future motivations etc with lots of word vomit on a platter.
The film keeps us interested until like 30-40 minutes of the film and once it becomes clear, who the real bad guy is (Parker), everything is quite predictable. There are some things that don’t really make much sense like in the start, the MI6 agent is walking up with a toxic needle to essentially give the arms dealer a heart attack but ends up getting caught & stabbing someone else.
They do catch the dealer alive but he kills himself and their boss gets mad at the MI6 for that. But if they were planning to kill him in the first place, then what difference does it make? Or the scene where the Charter team gets stuck in a bunker and they can reach Agent Stone through a landline but can’t call someone else to rescue them?
Secondly, I have never seen such a fickle-minded/weak antagonist. Just like the word vomit, the film overall lacks subtlety. One moment Keya wants to shoot Stone down and the very next moment she is whimpering for her help and wants to be on her side. Despite having a good cast, the emotionless, half-baked story brings everything crashing down. If you are only interested in action then there are some decent sequences that one might like.
Rating: 2.5/5
Heart of Stone is currently streaming on Netflix.
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