Heart of Stone | Review by: Benjamin Garrett

Netflix has thrown a lot of action movies at us over the last few years, in hopes of launching their own hit action franchise. Heart of Stone is their latest attempt, and let me tell you, this certainly isn’t the hit they’re looking for.

I try to find positive aspects to touch on in my reviews, but I’m struggling here. This movie is being billed as a Mission: Impossible style action thriller, which is frankly a little insulting to those films. Whereas M:I is known for creative, adrenaline pumping action, Heart of Stone is excruciatingly generic from head to toe, without an ounce of originality or creativity to be found. It borrows so much from popular action franchises, but does it poorly. There’s even a lousy James Bond style intro with an original song. Everything here - and I do mean everything - is something that’s been done better before.

With a budget of over 100 million, you’d think the movie should at least look good, right? Sadly that’s not the case. I know Gal Gadot probably took home a sizeable chunk of that, but there’s still no excuse for how bad everything looks. The action sequences might’ve seemed solid on paper, but the on-screen results are bland and boring. The editing is also all over the place, with a slew of quick cuts filling in for decent fight choreography. The visual effects aren’t offensively bad, but they sure don’t look like they belong in such an expensive film.

The cookie-cutter plot is the most underwhelming element of the movie. It’s like a Frankenstein’s monster of plot points from other action films, including one glaringly obvious similarity to the very recent M:I Dead Reckoning. The few elements that aren’t rehashed are drastically underdeveloped, and apart from one turn of events that genuinely caught me off guard, there’s little room for surprises.

Heart of Stone is insufferably generic, failing to bring anything new, exciting or even remotely fun to the genre. It falls embarrassingly short on almost every front, setting the bar at a new low for Netflix’s action catalogue.

0.5/5

Review by: Benjamin Garrett

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