Review: ‘Heart of Stone’ is a Netflix killer-spy movie about all-powerful AI. Far-fetched twist: Actual humans wrote the script.
Saying the new Netflix spy thriller “Heart of Stone” is nothing special doesn’t fully capture its nothing-specialness. This isn’t “second screen” stuff, designed to have on in the background while you dink around on your phone or duck downstairs to throw in a dryer sheet. No, this is more like third-screen material; “Heart of Stone” works like a dutiful, beaten-down undercover agent, on deep background, while you watch something else on your laptop, while also phone-googling “Gal Gadot” and “better movies.”
“Heart of Stone” concerns a globe-trotting race for control of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence (shades of “Mission: Impossible 7″ and a hundred other movies), powered by a quantum computer that really knows its stuff. Gadot stars as Rachel Stone, a relative newbie on the MI6 British intelligence team. Ten minutes into the opening Italian Alps melee, where the good-guy ops pursue a sinister arms dealer, we learn Stone works on the sly for the global spy network known as The Charter. The Charter’s ace in the hole is the Heart, the AI thingie so advanced it can predict the future. The movie merely suggests this; it’d be too much effort to exploit that angle.
Screenwriters Greg Ruckaand Allison Schroederask the question: Can the Charter retain control of the Heart? Or will it fall into the nefarious hands of the all-pro hacker played by the most interesting cast member, Alia Bhatt, lately seen in the delirious “RRR”? She’s in league with some world-domination weasels, and the chief weasel constitutes a spoiler. OK, I’ll play along this once.
Every line in director Tom Harper’s digital-effects jankfest sounds like it was written for the trailer. “I can’t believe it. Europe’s most wanted arms dealer seen for the first time in three years,” one of Stone’s associates mutters, helpfully, since we need to know that information. It makes you pine for the relatively realistic and cinematic payoffs in the latest “Mission: Impossible.”
In Lisbon, after car chases and motorcycle chases and the dispatching of various “hostiles,” there’s a wait, what? plot twist, all the more strange because “Heart of Stone” won’t shut up about how the Heart is literally all-knowing and all-seeing. Yet when the plot twist arrives, Stone has a line (paraphrasing here) “Yeah, didn’t see that coming,” and then her wise and weary boss (Sophie Okonedo, who helps) adds: “No, neither did the Heart.” What, what? Is the Heart all-powerful but extremely lazy?
Wherever the locale, the interior sequences favor dim, low-contrast digital photography that adds to the general bleh. To become a true screen action hero outside the “Wonder Woman” realm, Gadot needs better material than this, and only when she gets to square off with Bhatt’s increasingly conflicted superhacker does “Heart of Stone” suggest a human pulse.
There’s a lot of killing and casual brutality in “Heart of Stone.” Staring down her most driven adversary in the fourth or fifth climax, Stone scolds the villain for being all about “threats and violence” and a tendency to “brutalize everyone around you.” Hey, just like the movie! And then “Heart of Stone,” which depends entirely on the threat of AI for its scenario, has the hypocritical gall to include a line about how the Heart is “an amazing tool,” and isn’t AI a wonder, but in the end you can’t always listen to algorithms.
Tell it to Netflix.
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'HEART OF STONE'
1.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of violence and action, and some language)
Running time: 2:05
How to watch: Netflix
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