Movie review: 'Heart of Stone' begins promising Gal Gadot franchise

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- Heart of Stone, coming to Netflix on Friday, aims to start a new franchise for star Gal Gadot. While it's not quite Wonder Woman or The Fast and the Furious, it's a solid start that warrants more adventures.

Rachel Stone (Gadot) is part of an MI6 team, but she is actually undercover for an agency called The Charter. Both groups are after The Heart, the Macguffin of the day that can hack into anything.

When a team of assassins attacks the MI6 team, Stone blows her cover to save them. Now, Stone races to locate Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt), the mastermind behind The Heart, before it falls into enemy hands.

The plot is as generic as the most forgettable James Bond films, but like those, it is enough to justify some fun set pieces. Of course, in 2023, set pieces can be far less thrilling with liberal use of computer effects, but Heart of Stone finds a better balance than most.

A mountain sequence blends wide shots of a real stunt person with closeups of Gadot clearly on a green screen. While an edit that favored the practical work would be preferred, 50/50 is better than nothing.

An aerial sequence probably has an even higher ratio of animated work, but most Hollywood movie set pieces are animated now. It's not as tactile as Mission: Impossible, but Heart of Stone has some fun ideas for Stone's missions.

Fight scenes include many shots of Stone in shadow or with her hair over her face so that a stunt person can perform more intense choreography. There are enough shots where you can clearly see Gadot, and she obviously has action movie experience, but she's still an actor, not an actual superhero.

Steven Price's effectively rousing score, obviously inspired by Bond, does a lot of the heavy lifting in action sequences. It's essentially the same four notes in a different order.

Like the Bond franchise, Heart of Stone begins with an action sequence and an animated title sequence. Here the animation is allowed to look stylized because it's not trying to simulate photorealistic footage.

The title animation avoids mimicking the Bond dancing silhouette aesthetic, instead providing artistic renderings of Gadot's adventures. Noga Erez's "Quiet" can't equal Shirley Bassey or Paul McCartney's legendary Bond themes, but it's catchier than Sam Smith and Billie Eilish's recent tracks.

Stone is obviously the character around whom the potential sequels will revolve, but she is surrounded by other standouts. Bhatt, who stole hearts in RRR, is an endearing reluctant partner and MI6 agent Yang (Jing Lusi) is awesome, too.

Dialogue doesn't do much beyond move the plot. Banter between Stone and her handler (Sophie Okonedo) is especially weak, so hopefully the sequel will give the script another pass to let the characters quip as well as they fight.

Heart of Stone is no Extraction 2, but it's more fun than many Netflix action movies. The Gray Man and The Old Guard are a low bar, but they're getting sequels, too, so Heart of Stone 2 sounds like more fun than those.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.