Heart of Stone Proves Netflix Can’t Tell the Difference between Real Movies and Fake Movies

If you’ve ever avoided an autoplaying movie long enough to actually browse a streaming service, you’ve run into knock-offs from The Asylum. The studio behind Sharknado, The Asylum’s main business is producing mockbusters—generic, store-brand movies titled and designed to trick your grandma into picking The Terminators instead of The Terminator. (In this scenario, your grandma rules.) While mockbusters are low-budget, slapdash moneygrabs, they are completely different than Heart of Stone, which falls into a far trickier category. The would-be action franchise-starter from Netflix is what I’d call a Fake Movie—two hours that have an uncanny resemblance to cinema, but upon closer inspection, are more akin to a business proposal. Its characters are chosen to be inoffensive and replicable. Its plot is a motor, fueled by buzzwords. Its purpose is to procreate, or if that fails, to permanently hold space in libraries where Real Movies once charged fees. It is born of board meetings, of powerful men in puffy vests asking why their investment of choice doesn’t have its own Mission: Impossible yet.

Aside from the staples—the diversified cast still starring two white people, the flattened globetrotting, the tech-based plot device—Heart of Stone’s proposal is “Can we make Gal Gadot an action hero this time?” Gadot plays Rachel Stone AKA Nine of Hearts, a super-spy working for a mysterious organization known as The Charter, embedded undercover with the boring normal spies in MI6. Her MI6 squad of Parker (Jamie Dornan), Bailey (Paul Ready) and Yang (Jing Lusi) have a fake “Welcome to Applebee’s!” cheer and an ill-defined purpose. Nobody has chemistry with each other, just like the different animatronics on amusement park rides can’t be said to have chemistry with each other.

Stone’s got her own mission, and goes after her team’s targeted baddie—Indian hacker Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt)—on a parallel course. The thing she’s got over these other spies is that she’s tapped into The Charter’s secret weapon: The Heart, an all-seeing prediction model that can run the numbers and crank out the best possible choice for any situation. All a capable spy would need, then, is someone to tell them where The Heart is guiding them, and they’ll never fail. Remember how cool it was when Han Solo told C-3PO to never tell him the odds? Well, now C-3PO is in charge of a spy movie. Hooray.

An uncomfortable irony smothers Heart of Stone as soon as you learn that an omniscient, surveillance-state algorithm is making life-and-death decisions. It’s an icky reminder of how Netflix actually does business (giving notes to creatives based on data they collect about how people watch their movies and shows) and of how an infatuated Hollywood still thinks computers are magic—or at least thinks that we think that.

This manifests in the movie as Stone, remotely connected to The Heart, seeing the world through a video game’s HUD: POV shots are decorated with useless digital lines, spinning dials measuring nothing, brackets around people (perhaps to scan and use later as unpaid extras), and a glowing green line telling her which path leads to success. It’s all conducted by Jack of Hearts (Matthias Schweighöfer), miming tired Minority Report gestures at floating, intangible computer nonsense. Nomad (Sophie Okonedo), their leader, joins him from time to time in their little laser tag lobby hideout, her hardass demeanor covered by lightshow grids. The only thing missing is geometric carpet and a cheesy instructional video.

But at least ‘90s arcades had an aesthetic. Heart of Stone is murky, drab and always going the wrong speed. It’s either motionless, allowing exposition scene after exposition scene to lay out the boring details of what might happen if the wrong folks get control of The Heart, or erratic, dicing its badly remixed action sequences like it was trying to avoid a copyright strike from the movies it steals from. Director of British TV and films like The Woman in Black sequel, Tom Harper brings Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder’s script to life with the same sense of action, tension and humanity as a TI-86 graphing calculator. Robotically accrued setpieces familiar to anyone who’s seen an action movie (specifically a Mission: Impossible movie) in the last few decades tumble after each other gracelessly. 

Car chases down foreign city streets crash into death-defying free-falls where mid-air fistfights vie for a parachute. They’re shot from unappealing, ugly angles (like out through the windshield, or from slanted, dark corners) and have no sense of physical reality. When a chunky utility van flees motorcycles and sedans down staircases and alleyways, there’s no sense of weight or scale between the vehicles; parachutes and wingsuits glide through the air like cartoon UFOs. Harper’s better with motorcycles; an Iceland highway chase, though the briefest of the bunch, at least conveys speed and tactility thanks to a blend of shots focused on wide-open space and tightly cramped quarters.

Weaving these inept box-checkers together is a thoroughly idiotic screenplay from Rucka, who wrote previous Netflix actioner The Old Guard, and Schroeder, Oscar-nominated for her work co-writing Hidden Figures. Lines like “I love what you’ve done with the place” and “He’s never met a bet he didn’t take” pass for zingers while every conversation feels half-turned towards the audience to make sure they’re keeping up. That would be more tolerable if there was actually something going on, but the plot is humorless, condescending and absent of ideas.

Heart of Stone is deeply disinterested in its own material. As Stephen A. Smith would say, “Drones, surveillance, things of that nature.” The movie doesn’t criticize the subterfuge or extrajudicial killings perpetrated by MI6, the Charter or the baddies, but suggests that they should only be done if a perfect computer tells them to. Or, maybe only if they do so with a friendly team of like-minded killers in a potential sequel. The movie doesn’t really care, but its very premise hints at some kind of confrontation between human and machine. Nope! The Heart’s fallibility is never called into question—even when it’s wrong, it’s right. It might say that a correct course of action will lead to the deaths of allies, but acting against its suggestion and trying to save those allies…still results in their deaths. All hail the algorithm.

With empty Fake Movies like these, you need to be the Bear Grylls of actors to survive. You need to be able to drink your own acting piss and make acting fires from your own shed body hair, because you’re dropped into no man’s land and given nothing. The Netflix-certified Fake Movie The Gray Man, another wannabe blockbuster where the super-spies have number names, at least had Ryan Gosling, an actor who can generate deadpan humor or quiet pathos from smirks and the most dire of scripts. Heart of Stone has the one-note Gal Gadot. Her motionless model face and alien affect, so perfect for the divine Wonder Woman, use the stiff script like a bludgeon. Vague backstory rattles out of her mouth like the hammering of typewriter keys. Bhatt, similarly in typewriter mode, seems abandoned, while Dornan can barely drum up the energy to finish his sentences, quipping and fighting like he just woke up. If The Heart recommended this casting—perhaps to hit the demographics seeking an A-list superhero, object of horny-mom desire, and/or Bollywood star—it would be its first mistake, but a fitting one for a film whose every creative decision intends to keep you from noticing what’s accidentally playing in the background and then turning it off.

This bland, fill-in-the-blanks mediocrity would be more watchable if it was far worse—a bad personality would at least be a personality. If every scene had a moment like the one where we find out that a state-of-the-art airship is flammably filled with that cutting-edge Hindenburg hydrogen, Heart of Stone would be a very different kind of dumb. But it is deathly intent on being basic, palatable, franchise-ready tofu. No sauce. It’s hard to watch a bad movie, of course, but like a terrible smell, sometimes there’s something to it. Something perverse. Shoveling down heaps of nothing like Heart of Stone, though, is like chewing through a mountain of cotton balls.

There’s a juvenile, crass pleasure knowing that the much more fun Asylum version of Heart of Stone would be titled Mission: Improbable, but that self-awareness is exactly what Fake Movies, those artistic automatons, never possess. Instead, they only have brand awareness, in that they feel desperately beholden to their streaming homes—like they were only made to fill slots on a corporate release calendar. Netflix doesn’t have a monopoly on Fake Movies, but its market share is sky-high. They have Fake Movies that masquerade as Judd Apatow comedies, other Gal Gadot spy blockbusters, and movies about a girl who is tall. These Fake Movies rotate through the content carousels like ornate, dead-eyed horses. Heart of Stone joins this line-up, but not as a knock-off and not as a tricky gimmick looking to fool ignorant or careless moviegoers. It releases into the world as planned: As a perfectly unenjoyable gift to shareholders everywhere.

Director: Tom Harper
Writer: Greg Rucka, Allison Schroeder
Starring: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo, Matthias Schweighöfer
Release Date: August 11, 2023 (Netflix)

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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