Heart of Stone review – IGN

However, a brilliant young hacker named Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt), has a personal vendetta against The Heart, bent on controlling it with her own group of dissenting thinkers and thugs. Because Stone is a work rather than a play—some might say she is taken advantage of by Charter—they share a grieving girl’s sense of mutual understanding throughout the film. Director Tom Harper’s smartest call is to draw on Gadot’s inherent ability to create empathy between characters, which adds plenty of spark to Rachel and Keya’s scenes. But any genuine exploration of who they are as people, rather than their ideological leanings, is marred by the film’s frantic pace.

Greg Rucka and Alison Schroeder’s script allows no space for any substantial moments of drama or nuance for anyone in the cast. This is Heart of Stone’s Achilles’ heel: Stone and company are reduced to a cast of spy characters, saddled with cringe-worthy dialogue, or worse, used as cannon fodder to spark some kind of unearned emotional moment for the hero. But perhaps that’s for the best, because otherwise the audience would have plenty of time to question the logic of how the people on screen could survive a desert picnic for hours without water. or how so a lot Bullets never manage to hit stone, even in open areas. At least when The Heart is on, there’s a semi-legitimate excuse for Stone’s excessive good luck. When it’s offline, the entire movie turns into a far-fetched fantasy.

Heart of Stone has a sleek look but consists entirely of empty-calorie set pieces that ooze significantly from other contemporary action films like The Gray Man, Extraction, or Red Notice. It ticks so many familiar boxes that you can finally anticipate every revelation of mustache twirl, “sudden” death, or eye-rolling countdown clock. It’s hard to get excited about Stone’s future adventures when there’s no reason to care about the remaining characters at the end of this one.