Do you have friends coming over next weekend? If you are looking for a drinking game for your party, then look no further than Heart of Stone on Netflix. Alia Bhatt’s Hollywood debut with Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan as co-stars is perfect for a “drink every time you see a Mission:Impossible scene” game. Better still, make it a “Tom Cruise did that” drinking game and your party will be a superhit.
Gadot’s Ethan Hunt, erm, sorry, Rachel Stone is a double agent at MI6, working for a super secret organisation (drink!) called The Charter. As an MI6 agent, Gadot pretends to be an IT newbie who is on her first mission with her team, which includes Yang (Jing Lusi), Bailey (Paul Ready) and Parker (Jamie Dornan). Their mission goes south when their coms are compromised by a female hacker, and their target, an arms dealer, ends up dead.
But not before Gadot tries to save the day using an earpiece that connects her to the Heart, a super-powerful computer that can hack into anything, including nuclear codes, and can almost predict the future (drink! Well, half a drink since Cruise was fighting the AI and Gadot is working for it). Oh, and the Heart is operated through holographic images that can be zoomed into and out of (drink!), handled by the Jack of Hearts (Matthias Schweighöfer).
Yes, everyone in The Charter has card-themed names. There is a Queen of Hearts also known as the Nomad (Sophie Okonedo), who is important; a King of Clubs (BD Wong), a King of Diamonds (Glenn Close) and a King of Spades (Mark Ivanir) who don’t really have much to do. Gadot is the Nine of Hearts.
The female hacker happens to be Alia Bhatt — Keya Dhawan, a computer prodigy who fell in with criminals after she had a falling out with her adoptive father. Chasing Dhawan, the MI6 team travels to Lisbon and into a trap, getting out of which involves a car chase through the streets of the city (drink!) with Gadot pulling off manoeuvres that outs her secret identity to her teammates. But she isn’t the only one with a secret. Dornan is also not who he appears to be and leaves Gadot to almost die as he reveals that he is after The Charter and the Heart and has been working with Keya all along.
Then it is a race to get to the Heart, which is in orbit in something called the Locker around Earth, which involves Gadot doing a Halo jump (drink!), then walking through a desert (drink!) and a bike chase (drink!). Gadot does fine in the action sequences but with Cruise getting us used to him risking life and limb for each of those stunts, the CGI versions in Heart of Stone feels, well, fake.
The film is so busy racing from one set piece to the other that it leaves us with little to no investment in the characters. Parker’s backstory doesn’t sound strong enough to propel his desire for power. We never get Rachel’s backstory, except for a throwaway line uttered by Keya, which tells us that she was trouble before she was recruited by The Charter (drink!). Keya, the big talking but naive hacker, is the only character that seems remotely interesting and Bhatt actually gives us a turn that we can root for should this film become a franchise, as it is clearly meant to be.
Heart of Stone is neither a good film or a bad one. It floats somewhere in the middle, a film that you don’t set aside time to watch but can be watched if you have nothing else to do.
