Heart of Stone

The Spy Who Bored Me

I’ve seen this movie before. Not Heart of Stone specifically—though, let’s be honest, I’ve seen that one too, at least in spirit—but the idea of it. The female-led spy thriller, the globe-trotting MacGuffin hunt, the morally ambiguous mentor figure, the third-act betrayal that isn’t really a betrayal because the script forgot to earn it.

It’s all here, assembled with the precision of a Swiss watch and the soul of a knockoff Rolex. The question isn’t whether Heart of Stone is derivative. The question is whether it even cares.

Tom Harper’s film arrives with the weight of franchise ambitions strapped to its back like a parachute that may or may not open. Skydance and Netflix clearly want this to be the start of something—Mission: Impossible meets Wonder Woman, with Gal Gadot as the linchpin of a new spy universe. But ambition isn’t the same as vision, and Heart of Stone moves through its paces with the enthusiasm of a student reciting a book report they didn’t read.

The locations are stunning (Lisbon’s neon-lit streets, the Italian Alps, a skydiving sequence that actually looks terrifying), the action is competently staged, and Gadot herself is, as always, a magnetic presence. But the film’s heart—if it has one—is buried under layers of exposition, cliché, and a plot that feels like it was reverse-engineered from a whiteboard of "spy movie beats."

Let’s talk about that plot for a second. Rachel Stone is an agent for a shadowy peacekeeping organization called the Charter, which operates in the moral gray area between good and evil. (The film’s idea of moral gray is letting Gadot’s character lie to a bad guy before shooting him in the face.

Revolutionary.) The Charter’s most prized asset is an AI called "The Heart," which can hack into any system on Earth. When a rogue hacker (Alia Bhatt, in her American film debut) steals The Heart, Rachel is sent undercover to stop her—only to discover that the hacker is actually working for a former Charter agent (Jamie Dornan) with a grudge. Cue betrayals, double-crosses, and a third-act reveal that no one in the audience will find surprising, because the film has spent the previous two hours telegraphing it like a semaphore flag in a hurricane.

The problem isn’t that the story is complicated. The problem is that it’s boring. Spy thrillers live or die by their ability to make the audience feel the weight of their stakes, and Heart of Stone never bothers to sell us on why we should care.

The Heart itself is a classic MacGuffin—a shiny object that exists solely to be chased—but the film doesn’t even give it the courtesy of making it interesting. In Mission: Impossible, the MacGuffins (nuclear codes, biological weapons, rogue AIs) at least feel like they matter. Here, The Heart is just a plot device with a fancy name and a CGI interface that looks like a screensaver from 2007.

The film’s most egregious sin isn’t its lack of originality; it’s its lack of urgency. Even the action sequences, which should be the film’s saving grace, feel oddly weightless. A car chase through Lisbon is competently shot, but it lacks the visceral thrill of, say, The Bourne Ultimatum’s Waterloo Station sequence.