Heart of Stone (2023)

Directed by Tom Harper. Starring Gal Gadot, Matthias Schweighöfer, Alia Bhatt, Jamie Dornan, Sophie Okonedo, Jing Lusi, Paul Ready, Archie Madekwe. [PG-13]

MI6 technical expert Rachel Stone (Gadot) is secretly working for a shadowy peacekeeping organization known as The Charter when she and her “surface team” are betrayed by exactly who you expect is going to betray them, someone hellbent on seizing control of a super-powerful artificial intelligence called “The Heart” (do you get the title now??). Not quite an execrable exercise within the spy-action formula, but surely one of the most worthless. It’s so preoccupied with setting up a hopefully-never-to-be franchise, that it compartmentalizes (and strands) everyone and everything into banal archetypes, cryptic world-building structures, and adequate-to-abysmal action scenes (key for decryption: they’re adequate when the camera holds still for a second or two and it looks like real people and locations and stunts are in play, they’re abysmal when CGI takes over, as in an early escape/chase sequence that’s “Die Another Day wavesurfing” levels of bad). Not a single thing sticks here, which is deadly in cinematic escapism that demands replayability and interest in further exploits, and the protagonist is no match in the same arena as Bond, Hunt, Bourne, et al—Gadot’s limited emotional range and low-flame charisma might have been okay for Wonder Woman, but for a super-agent as nondescript as this one, her facsimile of star power isn’t a commodity. Even mid-film cameos from Glenn Close and BD Wong carry no weight (or delight), especially since we barely understand who they are and why they matter inside the tiresome entity of The Charter, whose “Heart” is so high-tech and all-knowing, it pushes well into the realm of science fiction while reusing the same old quasi-futuristic visual tricks. I suspect your heart would need to be made out of gelatin to adore this sub-generic non-starter. Gadot also co-produced alongside David Ellison, Bonnie Curtis, and several others.

30/100