Cast: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, and Matthias Schweighöfer
It would be amusing to review the new Netflix flick ‘Heart of Stone’, directed by Tom Harper, in a thoughtful way when the film itself doesn’t take any of its parts seriously.
To say the least , this Gal Gadot star vehicle is a damp squib with the credit (make that ‘blame’) going to its bland-to-the-core writing and tedious filmmaking.
The film marks the Hollywood debut of the charming Alia Bhatt, but its intent is focused only on giving superstar Gadot another hit franchise. The result is a disaster.
‘Heart of Stone’ follows international intelligence agent Rachel Stone’s (Gadot) action-filled journey to save the mysterious AI system — ‘The Heart’ — which faces a threat from Keya Dhawan (Alia) and the agents she works with.
In the mission, Rachel wears many hats — a well-versed techie, a rigid fighter and a dashing motorist — pulling off rampages across multiple European and African locations. Meanwhile, the plot takes some unremarkable twists and turns.
Though the action is the only bright spot, the choreography of those sequences seem exaggerated and contrived. The computer graphics imagery (CGI) doesn’t help either, making it hard to distinguish the film from mediocre video games.
Gadot and Alia can do only so much when the mish-mash screenplay lacks originality. The film offers nothing we haven’t seen before, and that is probably why it landed directly on OTT.
Published 19 August 2023, 04:12 IST