Director – Tom Harper, Screenplay – Greg Rucka & Allison Schroeder, Story – Greg Rucka, Producers – Bonnie Curtis, David Ellison, Gal Gadot, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Julie Lynn & Jaron Varsano, Photography – George Steel, Music – Steven Price, Visual Effects Supervisor – Mark Breakspear, Visual Effects – Light VFX, NetFX, NViz Studio, One of Us (Supervisor – Ola Pellerud Hamletsen), Rodeo FX, Inc (Supervisors – Raphael Leterte & Javier Roca), Rotomaker, Studio Framestore, Inc. (Supervisor – Mathew Krentz), The Third Floor, Inc & Viridian FX, Visual Effects/Animation – Luma Pictures (Supervisor – Farhad Mohasseb), Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Corbould, Prosthetics Designer – Julie Dartnell, Production Design – Charles Wood. Production Company – Skydance/Mockingbird Pictures/Pilot Wave Motion Pictures.
Cast
Gal Gadot (Rachel Stone), Jamie Dornan (Parker), Alia Bhatt (Keya Dhawan), Matthias Schweighöfer (Jack of Hearts), Sophie Okonedo (Nomad), Paul Ready (Bailey), Jing Lusi (Yang), B.D. Wong (King of Clubs), Glenn Close (King of Diamonds/Nancy Morrison), Mark Ivanir (King of Spades), Enzo Cilenti (Mulvaney), Jon Kortajarena (The Blond)
Plot
Rachel Stone is tech support for an MI6 team. While on a mission to a mountainside casino in the Italian Alps to apprehend an arms dealer, Rachel volunteers to go inside so that they can obtain access to the security system, her first time venturing into the field. What is unknown by the others is that Rachel is actually a highly-skilled agent for the secretive organisation The Charter. She is forced to go into action to prevent the mission going sideways. While in the casino, Rachel made eye contact with a woman that she later identifies as Keya Dhawan, a hacker for another unknown group. Rachel tracks Keya down in Lisbon and the team go to intercept her, during which Rachel is forced to break her cover. However, the mission is sabotaged as team member Parker reveals he works for the other group and shoots everyone else and poisons Rachel. Rachel is whisked back to Charter headquarters to be saved but Parker has hidden a device on her body that infiltrates The Charter’s computer systems. Rachel goes out on her own to stop Parker as he hijacks The Locker, an airship above the Senegal desert that contains The Heart, The Charter’s computer system that can break through all encryption. With this, Parker intends to eliminate The Charter and take control of all information systems around the world.
Heart of Stone is a production that comes from Skydance, a relatively new studio that has come increasingly to the forefront in the 2010s. Lead actress Gal Gadot co-produces through her Pilot Wave Motion Pictures production company. It is hard to get accurate figures on the film’s budget with various sources giving estimates going from $68 million to quite believably upwards of $130 million. With such a budget, along with the huge name cast the film has, the lavish international globe-trotting locations and exhilarating action sequences, it is a major surprise that Heart of Stone wasn’t granted a theatrical release but instead went straight to streaming on Netflix. There it became the No 1 streaming title in the week of its release.
Director Tom Harper has emerged through British tv with acclaimed works such as Demons (2009), This is England 86 (2010), The Borrowers (2011) and War and Peace (2016), as well as episodes of Peaky Blinders (2013-22). Harper moved onto film with The Scouting Book for Boys (2009), followed by The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (2014) for the revived Hammer Films, Wild Rose (2018) and The Aeronauts (2019).
The spy film has a long history, having been popularised with the James Bond films back with Dr No (1962) and a long line of sequels, copycats and parodies since then. (I have a detailed essay on the genre here at Spy Films). Spy films of the 2020s have, as most films have, swung towards diverse representation with the all-female or women-led likes of the tv series Killing Eve (2018-22) and the films Red Sparrow (2018), Charlie’s Angels (2019), The 355 (2022), The Mother (2023) and Argylle, along with the neutering of James Bond in No Time to Die (2021). Heart of Stone follows suit and presents a film with a deliberately diverse international cast line-up and a female lead who is shown to be so strong, talented and assured that it enters into the realms of fantasy.
Gal Gadot as Rachel StoneGal Gadot dives off The Locker as it explodes
The film puts its foot to the pedal and keeps going from its opening sequence set at a mountainside casino where gambling games sit alongside sequences involving gondola, vehicle and snowmobile races down the mountainside and Gal Gadot even taking a leap of a cliffside with a parachute and making a hair-raising descent through wooded slopes, all amid a great deal of gunfire. It leaves you breathless within the first fifteen minutes as though you have watched the action sequences from half-a-dozen Bond films edited together.
The rest of the film is filled with similar such sequences – a frenzied full tilt chase through the streets of Lisbon with vehicles even heading down inclined tramlines while trying to avoid collision with the trams. There is a fight aboard and inside the interior of a vast dirigible, which ends with a seat-edge sequence with a parachuteless Gal diving off the burning airship after the departing helicopter and falling through the air in free dive to try and catch the unconscious Alia Bhatt. It’s an exhilarating and vertiginous sequence that has you on the edge of the seat.
Certainly, Heart of Stone comes with has a really, really improbable premise. The first part of this is that we see an MI6 team with Gal Gadot as a nerdy tech support who has never been in the field before. No problem with that but then we learn that Gal is actually a highly trained agent with another agency that is so secret and covert people only believe is mythic. Moreover, they are fighting against another group that is so secretive that they don’t even have a name. I thought for a while we might be in for a version of tv’s late, great Alias (2001-6). Despite the incredible ease with which people are shown being able to gain information throughout, not one but two people have managed to infiltrate a crack MI6 operational team, something that actually requires several years training. The big problem that Heart of Stone is stuck with is that Gal Gadot is meant to be posing as a nerdy tech support who never leaves the van, while the plot requires that she also be in the midst of all the action. The script gets around this and promptly has her cover blown not far into the film and the rest of the team eliminated.
Heart of Stone is a Techno-Thriller featuring ultimate encryption keys – a McGuffin device that has appeared as in a surprising number of other recent films including Fast & Furious 9 (2021), The 355, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023) and Spy Kids: Armageddon (2023) – although this is one of the few that does show such a device actually being employed rather than merely sought by everybody. Even aside from that, the film features magical hacking abilities and systems – the casual ability to access any security and cellular system, create ids in moments, even obtain closeup imaging of action scenes taking place 85,000 feet up in the air. It is a fantasy film, both in terms of its technicals and Gal Gadot’s fantasy of hyper-competence, but for all that is a hugely entertaining ride.
