Netflix’s Heart of Stone Is a Mission: Impossible Wannabe That Mostly Misses

The throwaway diversion is nothing new in the world of movies, though the era of content may very well be its golden age. Never has there been so much stuff, of varying quality, for you to put in front of your bored eyeballs. As throwaway diversions go, Netflix’s Heart of Stone—starring Gal Gadot as a secret operative who at one point flies through the air in a puffy flying-squirrel suit—is neither great nor terrible. It occupies that vast middle zone of small-screen movies that easily fill the void of a few empty hours, if you happen to have any to spare, though it’s nothing you’d carve out time in your schedule to watch.

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Gadot’s Rachel Stone is the rookie on a team of MI6 agents, eagerly learning the ropes from her peers. There’s ace driver Bailey (Paul Ready), a sweet, bearded bachelor who’s eager to show off pictures of his adored marmalade cat before anyone even asks; Yang (Jing Lusi), a no-nonsense, take-charge type who doesn’t mind having Rachel under her wing; and well-dressed swagger-dude Parker, played by Jamie Dornan, whose handsomely chiseled face always throws me for a minute when I first see it: Is that one of the Christmas Prince/Princess Switch guys? (Eventually I place him, and although his performance is perfectly serviceable here, it’s good to remember that he was wonderful as the father in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, and he may very possibly be a brilliant comedic actor, if his turn as sexy evil henchman Edgar Pagét in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is any indication.)

Cautious newbie Rachel, who’s excellent at following instructions, is exceedingly fond of her colleagues, and she shares their disappointment when they botch the first mission shown in the movie: they’re supposed to nab a baddie at a luxe Italian ski resort—the first of the film’s several handsome locations, which also include Lisbon and Reykjavik—but someone else gets to him first. They return to London not for a new assignment, but to do paperwork. But it’s all OK with Rachel; she’s really more of a behind-the-scenes person anyway.

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Or is she? The plot of Heart of Stone involves a group of top-level former intelligence agents who comprise the Charter, an organization that makes use, for good not evil, of a vast data-tracking thingie known as the Heart, which has the power to make planes drop out of the sky, highjack nuclear weapons, and so forth. The smarties of the Charter include ringleader Nomad (Sophie Okonedo) and a group of operatives with nicknames drawn from the suits of playing cards (in tiny snippets of screentime, we meet BD Wong’s King of Clubs and Glenn Close’s King of Diamonds). A mysterious tech-head named Keya (Alia Bhatt) seeks control of the Heart. Somehow, Rachel Stone fits into all of this, and she gets to wear some fine spy outfits, including a marshmallowy puffer jacket that magically makes her look slender and, much later, a jersey dress like an orange flame.

In addition, there are lots of explosions and action sequences in Heart of Stone, as well as a pinwheeling car chase, though none of that should come as a surprise. (The director is Tom Harper, who made the lovely 2018 film Wild Rose, starring Jessie Buckley. The script is by Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder.) The movie’s plot is negligible, seemingly stitched from vague bits and bobs of various Mission: Impossible movies—unsurprising because like those pictures, it’s a product of Skydance Media, and quite clearly intended to be the beginning of a franchise. But Heart of Stone is quite glossy and beautiful to look at, and though there’s not much that’s dynamic about her, Gadot at least has a charming insouciance. Even if you’ll be hard-pressed to remember any of it three hours later, the runtime of Heart of Stone flies by quickly enough. But not nearly as fast as Gadot’s character in her flying-squirrel onesie.