Heart of Stone, a spy thriller with Gal Gadot as a secret agent, premieres on Netflix August 11, and is in select theaters the same day. Tom Harper directs the PG-13 movie.
Gadot, star of Wonder Woman, plays Rachel Stone, a member of a mysterious group of elite spies known as the Charter. In the trailer, they’re described as “the most highly trained agents — no political leanings, no national allegiances — working together to keep peace in a turbulent world.”
To achieve their lofty ambitions, those agents rely on an enigmatic AI asset called the Heart.
“If you own it, you own the world,” the trailer says of the Heart.
The cast includes Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt and Sophie Okonedo.
Gadot told Netflix marketing arm Tudum of her character, “It was really important to me that Rachel be a character who can fight, but I also wanted her to be able to use her brain, intuition and emotions. She doesn’t just run in, guns blazing. She thinks about how she’s affecting people and situations. I choose roles that show that women can be beautiful and strong, and none of this is mutually exclusive.”
A review in the New York Times said Heart of Stone frequently borrows from Mission: Impossible and other action films. “A motorcycle chase strikingly similar to the exquisite one from Rogue Nation looks flat and pedestrian by comparison, with dull staging and a corny gag; its knockoff Fallout HALO jump, however, is shameless plagiarism, made all the more insulting by appearing so ludicrously fake. [Tom] Cruise jumped out of an actual airplane. Gadot free falls through bad C.G.I.”
Variety called the movie “joyless.” The Hollywood Reporter, for its part, said Heart of Stone “feels only marginally less manufactured from the spare parts of other movies.”
Director Harper said of Rachel Stone, “There is a deep care and compassion for people as the driving force of her actions. It often feels that there's one character acting in an almost God-like way, saving the world but yet disregarding the humans around them,” he told Tudum. “This is a bit different, it has a bit more of a humanistic approach.”
