UNITED STATES: How much can a star-studded spy thriller be expected to be generic, mediocre, and boring? Well, the Gal Gadot and Alia Bhatt starrer Heart of Stone answers the question. In an eagerness to bring the successful espionage featurette to the watchlist, Netflix is back with A-list actors, where it tries to deliver an engaging story brimming with secret agents but fails to do so.
Heart of Stone: A waste of acting potential
When it comes to analyzing the plot of Heart of Stone, well, it doesn’t have any. The big streaming platforms’ obsession with spy thrillers is beyond understanding. Last year Netflix released The Gray Man under the vision of The Russo Brothers; it also came out as a generic story but managed to do the job with Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, and Dhanush in the team.
Later Amazon Prime Video released Citadel featuring Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden. With a whopping reported budget of $300 million, only the makers of this Russo Brothers-backed spy action series know what mess they have created. Now, Heart of Stone joins the list, but it can be ranked even lower than Citadel.
Where to start when everything is messy? This Tom Harper-directed film has only one thing which glues our eyes to the screen, and that is its action sequence showcased in the starting. Gal Gadot, as the lead of the acting department, plays the role of a secret agent Rachel Stone who is after a plot device, ‘The Heart’, which falls into the wrong hands. That’s it; this is all you need to know.
The Heart of Stone makers have failed miserably to properly utilize the star power of Gal Gadot, who aced brilliantly as Wonder Woman in 2017 (not the horrible 2021 sequel). She is a brilliant actor, and even she can’t save this Netflix film from falling into a pit hole of mediocrity and cliches.
Netflix had a good chance to grab the attention of Indian audiences with Alia Bhatt in the ensemble cast, but here also, the streaming giant fails to do so. Unfortunately, Bhatt’s debut in Hollywood will be counted with Heart of Stone.
If we look at the Indian actors’ roles in Hollywood, The Gray Man, which is also a Netflix featurette, managed to pull out the best of Dhanush. The Tamil star’s character of The Lone Wolf appears for a short duration, but it surpasses the screen presence of Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling.
The same could have been carried out with Alia’s character, but what we get is a total waste of her acting potential.
Verdict:
Heart of Stone, starring Gal Gadot and Alia Bhatt, is another generic, mediocre, and boring spy thriller which fails to handle the star potential of its lead actors with a mediocre story.
Transcontinental Times rating: 2/5
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