Heart of Stone marks the latest in a series of blockbuster action-adventure movies, made for Netflix, featuring a combination of big movie stars and some of the worst action filmmaking you can imagine. It's not the worst of the genre—The Gray Man, from last summer, may never be topped—but it's still mostly a failure, despite a pair of appealing lead performances.
This is a movie that seems to owe its existence to an algorithm that determined audiences really like to stream globe-trotting action thrillers in which the action is just about impossible to see. It steals almost all its ideas, and its visual style, from the Bourne movies, which represent an era of action filmmaking that's long been passed by.
It's handheld shaky-cam, with lots of action sequences that are poorly-lit, shoddily-blocked, with many instances of the camera pointing at the characters' feet, mid-fight. Erstwhile Wonder Woman Gal Gadot, who previously starred in the Bad Netflix touchstone Red Notice, stars as Rachel Stone, a badass secret agent, who’s dedicated to protecting an all-powerful surveillance tool called The Heart. So the movie is Heart of Stone, the MacGuffin is The Heart, and her name is Stone. Gadot is enjoyable here, and I don't doubt her future as a movie star, as some have; I just wish she wouldn't choose to star almost exclusively in dreadful projects.
Gadot's Rachel nominally works as an agent for MI6, where she pretends to be a mousy computer specialist while her teammates do all the fighting on the missions. But she secretly works as a super-spy for "The Charter," an all-powerful international syndicate with carte blanche to chase, kill, or terminate whoever they wish, wherever they wish. (The MI6/Charter ruse is one of the film's more interesting elements, but one it completely drops it at the end of the first act—didn't she have handlers who wondered where she went?)
The Charter operates with the help of The Heart, an extreme surveillance tool that can track anyone, while also gaining unfettered access to all the bank accounts and weapons on the planet. If only it doesn't somehow fall into the wrong hands… Those hands end up belonging to Parker (Jamie Dornan), hamming it up as a fun villain.
The Heart comes in handy as a way of making the missions look cool, with a data visualization tool that looks like what Tom Cruise was working with in Minority Report. Rachel gets a nerdish handler who uses The Heart to determine the percentage of likelihood a mission will succeed.
A more interesting version of this story—see "The Entity" in last month’s Mission: Impossible, or the precognition tech in Minority Report itself—would explore the question of whether such a tool should exist at all. Not only is there the risk of it falling into the hands of bad guys, but it's immoral that any organization has that much power. Oppenheimer was a three-hour exploration of what it means for a government, and the people who work for it, to have access to weapons of terrible power—including plentiful worry about what happens if the weapon ends up in enemy hands.
I was hoping Heart of Stone would end with the heroes, having seen the error of their ways, realizing that humans can't be trusted with such power and deciding to destroy the weapon. But they don't. The film has implied that The Charter’s done shady things in the past, under the leadership of an uncredited, cameo performer.
Gal Gadot falling out with the secretive organization she works for and gunning for them will have to wait for the second or third sequel. That's the one thing from the Bourne movies that Heart of Stone didn't steal, but probably should’ve. This is all wrong. Heart of Stone's ending would be like if Robert Oppenheimer had turned to Einstein at the end of Oppenheimer and said, "We did good, kid."