Tom Harper directs Gal Gadot as though she’s a secret in an action picture for Netflix that also stars Jamie Dornan.
Ssh! Don’t tell anyone. I MEAN ANYONE!!!
Life is cheap. Bloodless bodies fall with metronomic regularity in a world cloaked in darkness. A woman stands above it all.
It’s never entirely clear why that particular woman, Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) by name, is fighting the battles murkily depicted by director Tom Harper (The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, 2014, and a swarm of British television). The action is nearly continuous — someone is always fighting someone else, for some reason or other — and the action is nearly impossible to follow, presented in the quick-cutting, Dutch-angled, utterly meaningless style that has plagued action-movie cinema for more than 20 years.
Comic book writer Greg Rucka turned to screenwriting by adapting his own comic book series The Old Guard (2020) for Netflix, which was marked by elaborate and incredibly brutal fight scenes under the direction of Gina Prince-Bythewood. Credited to both Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder (Hidden Figures), the screenplay sets up what is clearly intended to be a series of setpieces that steadily increase in gravity and consequences.
Early on, Rachel Stone’s cover as a non-field agent for British intelligence agency MI-6 is blown, to audiences if not the MI-6 team itself, a collection of clueless jokers led by Parker (Jamie Dornan). In fact, Rachel Stone is working undercover at the behest of a shadow organization, The Charter, led by Sophie Okonedo, whose orders appear to be dictated by AI, or something similar. Soon enough, things get turned on their head, more people die, and a sinister plot to keep many more people is revealed.
On paper, the narrative creates a patchy framework for continuous action to unfold. Time is of the essence! Something must be done! You are the only one who can save us, Wonder Woman Rachel Stone!
On screen, the action sequences are staged so that it’s difficult to see who is doing what to whom. That undoubtedly allows talented stunt performers to pull off the complicated and potentially dangerous stunts involved in a safe and secure manner, with the assumption that many sequences were performed in the more controlled environment of a soundstage.
No arguments there — safety comes first — but director Tom Harper is unable to meet the challenge of making the action sequences come alive by dramatic means. So they never spark under the cover of darkness, nor feel particularly dangerous or distinguished.
They just fill up the time in a movie that had the potential to be a fun or suspenseful joy ride and instead feels like a disconsolate, listless ride on a bus to nowhere.
Dallas Film Now. 
One response to “Review: ‘Heart of Stone,’ Cloaked in Darkness, Action Unfolds Around Gal Gadot ”
[…] found the film immensely derivative and its story to be overcomplicated. As for Peter A. Martin of Dallas Film Now, he highlighted that the action wasn’t particularly engaging. “Director Tom Harper is […]