Review: HEART OF STONE

You probably saw the trailer for Heart of Stone recently. It’s basically James Bond with a girl. I watched it and here is my review.

Heart of Stone stars Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Paul Ready, Jing Lusi, Enzo Cilenti, Alia Bhatt and Sophie Okonedo. The story is:

An intelligence operative for a shadowy global peacekeeping agency races to stop a hacker from stealing its most valuable and dangerous weapon.

The Story

I will put spoilers later, but honestly, you can guess what they are going to be. Stone (Gadot) is in an MI6 team in Italy to snatch an arms dealer. Stone isn’t a field agent, but has to get out of the van to hack into security, so the team are worried about her.

It’s all fine and everything is going according to plan, until the mysterious Keya Dhawan cuts the communication of the team and presents a new threat. As the team try to escape with the arms dealer, Stone is left on her own.

It turns out she’s a double agent, working with MI6, but in reality she was infiltrated into MI6 by the Charter, a super secret group who have The Heart. This is a supercomputer that can work out the probability of any situation and provide guidance to get out of it. This is where the movie falls down.

The Heart seems to be able to predict anything and, with satellite information, can guide Stone to a parachute on the edge of a cliff, onto a snow bike and through a forest without any trouble. It can literally guide her path with a heads-up display that will tell her where every tree is.

I’m all for a bit of fun in a movie, but this was a little too much. In almost every situation, the Heart knows what’s going to happen and when. It can predict where bombs might go off, who might try to assassinate who, and would probably be able to tell you how crap a new Disney movie is going to be.

Spoilers

It turns out that Dhawan isn’t the actual bad guy, it’s a guy. It’s one of the MI6 team and you can see it a mile away. The bad guy is trying to steal the Heart, Stone has to stop him, blah blah blah. By the end of the movie, Dhawan and Stone team up to beat the bad man. Only men are evil, all women are good.

End of Spoilers – Overall

Heart of Stone is a paint-by-numbers action movie with “the message” firmly inserted in it. The action moments are pretty good, but nothing amazing. The acting is pretty good, but nothing amazing. The story is far too over the top and badly written.

Most of the time the movie is taking itself seriously, but then you have scenes where the team are hanging out and dancing to music. It’s been a hard day spying, now a chance to relax, crank up those tunes bro and let’s party.

It wants to be a James Bond movie, but with a woman who’s better than Bond since she’s a double, triple, quadruple agent working for 15 sides and manages to handle it fine. James wouldn’t be able to do that, you know, he has a penis.

Heart of Stone just isn’t worth your time. It passed two hours, but I wouldn’t watch it again.