Compared to some other glossy Netflix spy/action flicks, Heart of Stone is pretty ok. It’s no Extraction with its minimalist plot but maximalist action but it’s also no Red Notice with its stupidity and… umm… it’s stupidity. You could do better things with your time though. Watch Wonder Woman again. Gaze longingly at the poster of Gal Gadot on your dorm room door…

Heart of Stone stars Gadot as a superspy working for a secret unaffiliated spy agency that takes on some of them there Impossible Missions. Her agency is lead by – get this – a super-smart predictive AI that can find anyone and hack everything. And the bad guys want it.

Yeah, clandestine spy agency and super smart AI? Haven’t we done this already… at least a dozen times lately? The biggest problem with this flick is just how familiar and generic it is. There was something momentarily interesting about the opening sequence where they try to convince us the six foot tall Amazon warrior with the face of a goddess is the geeky “woman in the chair”. But the rest of the movie is pretty much on auto-pilot.

It’s sometimes a perfectly ok auto-pilot spy flick… and at other times less so. It has dodgy CGI (especially in the opening action set piece) and it gets mired in eye-rolling motivations and exposition scenes. There’s probably only one interesting character and it’s not Gal Gadot (or Jamie Dornan). Alia Bhatt plays an enemy spy who has a decent burgeoning relationship with Gadot. It’s not great but it made me think we should have been following her story the whole time.

And… yeah… it’s a spy flick with a glossy coat of paint. It’s not terrible, it’s not exactly boring, but it doesn’t try hard enough to be interesting or thrilling. There are a couple decent action set pieces, I suppose… and Gal Gadot can be gazed longingly at. Watch it or don’t.

Score: 74