Of all the flotsam cluttering up the modern movie landscape—Star Wars regurgitations, DC conflagrations, Marvel being oh-so-diverse—the American Netflix actioner is the most disposable. Who would care, really, if 6 Underground, Extraction and its sequel, Red Notice and The Gray Man were to disappear overnight from the platform? These films range from techno-thrillers to adventure comedies to brutal extended set piece workouts. Yet they all have a fatal dullness, with their gargantuan sequences that go on for 10, 15 minutes without respite or clarity or joy. The writing is mostly variations on ‘your cover is blown’ and ‘it’s just a surface wound’. The assorted spies and special ops and assassins are so interchangeable it’s surprising Netflix hasn’t tried to weave them into a super-soldier-verse.
Adding another 123 minutes to the heap is Tom Harper's Heart
of Stone. Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) must find a way to stop an all-powerful
AI system dubbed the Heart (get it?) from falling into the wrong hands. Her MI6
teammates, Theresa (Jing Lusi), Max (Paul Ready) and Parker (Jamie Dornan),
wouldn’t know a ridiculously competent agent if she was sitting with them in
the van, pretending to be a shy newbie. The film starts off with one of those
long, long action sequences, with the three agents pursuing a target across the
snowy Alps, unaware that Stone is also chasing him via parachute, zipline and
bike—and doing a better job.
After the chase, the quartet unwind in a café, eat fries and
complain about paperwork, a rather endearing scene. Max brings up a shadowy
organization called the Charter, who take out the same sort of dangerous
targets they do, but with apparently more success. His colleagues groan and
tease him, but in this moment we know who Stone really works for. During the
earlier chase, Stone was guided by a man in front of a bank of
three-dimensional images, feeding her information about the landscape, enemy
movements, potential dangers. This is the Heart, a weapon so sophisticated it
can only be defeated by the most formidable adversary imaginable: a lone hacker
from Pune.
Those excited about Alia Bhatt’s Hollywood debut might be
disappointed to learn that she only joins the film properly after a significant
amount of time has elapsed. She plays Keya, the hacker who’s helping [redacted]
take control of the Heart. There’s a passage where she and Stone are stranded
in a desert, a standard getting-to-know-you-while-trying-to-stay-alive
scenario, which American films used to be able to do in their sleep. This one
is terribly awkward, the pressure of creating chemistry with Gal Gadot
defeating the actor who managed to make even Arjun Kapoor seem charming.
The writing is tin-earned, but Gadot—an elegant action star
and a cautious actor—makes it worse. “Are you trying to kill us?” Parker asks
as Stone drives like a maniac, pursued by assorted killers. “Pretty much the
opposite, actually” is her reply—terrible line, no doubt, but why say it with a
straight face, enunciating every syllable? Late in the film, Stone says, “The
problem with… you is that your power is only ever based on threats and
violence.” Gadot does a little sniff and laugh before saying this, a
depressingly literal interpretation of what the subtitles describe as
‘[scoffs]’.
There’s one performance with charm and lightness: Matthias
Schweighöfer as ‘Jack of Hearts’, Q to Gadot’s Bond, but a joyful sprite
instead of a morose geek. There’s a brief, beautiful scene where he’s
surrounded by images supplied by the Heart, whisking them here and there, as Everywhere
by Fleetwood Mac plays. As for Bhatt, she deserves better. Dress it up all you
want, the Indian ends up as tech support.
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