 Professional model and actress Gal Gadot is back, baby! With another Netflix exclusive! Oh. Well, that deflated fast. When my brain hears Netflix exclusive, I instantly jump to the Sony Spider-Man universe, their villain universe with Craven and Morbius and Venom. It's not good. And neither is Gal Gadot's new film, Heart of Stone. If seeing this beautiful actress gives you a heart on, feel free to subscribe to the channel. Also do it for the puns. And the title of this film is a pun as well, which I love. I'm a big fan of the puns, the play on words, things of that nature. It's good stuff. It's the only good thing really going on in this movie. Heart of Stone refers to Agent Stone, the MI6 operative played by Gal Gadot. The heart portion is the other agency she works for. The heart or the charter. I honestly don't know what the fuck the thing is called because this movie's all over the place. Names are getting thrown around willy-nilly. Her name is Nine of Hearts over there. That's her call sign. She refers to Kings and other higher-up officials. This is probably something they're trying to build into a franchise, but I don't see it happening because Gal Gadot can't act. That's the big takeaway from this flick. You know, she was kind of skating by for me for the longest time because she is just really stupidly attractive. And I like seeing her as Wonder Woman because the acting doesn't need to be anything profound or amazing at all. She just has a look really hot, pick up trucks, pretend like she's getting hurt once in a while. And that's about it. It doesn't take much. But this movie requires more than that. They're clearly trying to build her up as an action star, an Angelina Jolie type. But Angelina Jolie actually can act. See, girl interrupted if you want to see her go full uncaged Jolie. Plus she looks great. So she's the whole package. Gadot, though, she needs to play her cards better, pun intended again because of the name. Now, do I think this movie would have been saved had they got someone more akin to an Angelina Jolie? No. No, I really don't. Although the charisma is definitely at play here and this character that Gal Gadot plays has zero of it. It's really the Wonder Woman 84 all over again. She's kind of very serious and mopey most of the time. Occasionally she'll flash that Kodak smile, but for the most part, she's just kind of a stock character. Almost like an NPC free guy that realized they were the show and stepped up in front of the cameras. This movie is a carbon copy of the last several Mission Impossible movies condensed into one very mediocre film. And I'm not even joking. This movie is essentially the plot of Dead Reckoning with the AI technology, which is insane in this film. It's basically Jarvis. This company, the Charter or the Heart. I really don't know what it's called. This guy is moving shit around. He's throwing things up. Incredibly impractical technology, but for this flick, it's working very well. Gal Gadot's character, Stone, aka Nine of Hearts, is a double agent. Is that the term? A secret agent? A secret, a double secret agent? She's working for MI6, but she's also working for the heart as an undercover MI6 agent. It's the perfect crime. Back in the day, my dad used to rent a lot of movies that I'd never heard of, or we'd catch whatever was on TV. Remember cable TV? That was the thing at one point. And I remember a lot of Saturday afternoons around 2 o'clock, sitting down on the couch with him and about 35, 40 minutes in, he's passed out. Sound of sleep. And when we hit that final 10 minutes, he's up again, fully refreshed and feels like he got everything he needed out of the film. That is exactly what Heart of Stone is. It's one of those lower grade flicks that you pick up featuring an actor you've heard of, but the movie didn't go to theaters for more than a day or two, or it was shot right out on VHS or DVD. It's a movie you fall asleep to on a Saturday afternoon. Again, every action scene is pulled directly from a Mission Impossible movie. They're all done far worse. There's no real practical effects I could see. A lot of CG halfway through the movie. There's this big action sequence that takes place on a giant blimp. Whole thing looks like it's shot in front of a green screen. Cartoon-ish is all hell. There's explosions everywhere. She's taken on one of the final bosses. And all I'm thinking is, all right, we're winding down. This is ending at least on a decent clip. I paused it. There were 50 minutes left of the movie. Movies used to follow a format, a playbook of sorts, if you will. A script, if you must, where you had a beginning, middle, and end. It's not profound. This isn't new information. Music was kind of the same way. First, first, second verse, a little interlude, and then you go out with a banger. Movies in the last few years have really flipped the script. Now you have a beginning, a middle, an end, an end, an end, an end. It won't end. When will it end? Please, God, make it end. That's the new format. I hate it. This is another two-hour movie that could have been far more sufferable if it was a half-hour shorter. Even 20 minutes shorter would have been a breath of fresh air. But instead, we overpack it. We have too many set pieces. They go on too long, and they are so mediocre. So what's the point of doing them? How about cut your time down and make things look better and seem more plausible and more exciting? The first 20 minutes of this movie is the first sting operation with this department, and I don't know what the fuck is going on because they haven't introduced anything. It's just people doing stuff. Stones in the car hacking. Her team are all fancily dressed up, grabbing drinks and, you know, canoodling with the people around and they're talking to each other and the camera's all quick and it's shaky. But I don't know what their goal is. If you're going to do a setup like that where you keep the audience in the dark, at least do it quickly. Get to the fucking point. But instead, it's 10, 15, 20 minutes dragged out and I'm still not sure what they're doing. You can't connect to anything. Contrast that with true lies. We know that Arnold's character is trying to infiltrate this mansion and he has to retrieve a document. It's set up and it's perfectly executed. That's how you do it correctly. From a visual standpoint, it's a Netflix movie. It looks pretty cheap. Clearly they put a lot of money into it but it doesn't look like it was money well spent. On a positive, I thought the soundtrack was really good. I liked the main score, the main theme. So did the editor because it's utilized every five minutes. At some points, I don't think it ever stops. I think there's a full 45 minutes where that theme song just continuously goes on a loop. This joke is made often but I genuinely think this script was generated at points by Chad GPT. There is some really cringy dialogue in this. I actually wrote some of it down. In one scene, Stone's trying to save her team by driving around and crashing into shit. And one of the people goes, are you trying to kill us? And she looks back and says, I'm actually doing the opposite probably. What? In another scene, the bad guy has her pinned down with a knife and he goes, but you missed me right here in front of your face the whole time. That's verbatim how that plays out. It's like you can't find a way to end his sentence on a high note. So he just keeps doing it. Game over for you again. This time it's personal for the last time friend. So to sum things up, what we have here is a very poor Mission Impossible clone with a lead character that has zero charisma or personality in this movie. Occasionally she flashes a smile, but it's short lived. She's the best of the best. There's a humorous scene early on where she takes out six bad guys before the rest of her team comes and they can't see what she did. So she has to dispose of the bodies. She has 30 seconds to do this. They are literally in front of her coming down this little slow moving ramp. And so she has to dispose of bodies in the middle of the snow. Somehow she cleaned up all the blood, removed all the footprints, no dragging of the bodies. I don't know how she did it because they don't show it, but they do show the ground freshly clean, nice soft powdered snow on top. Nothing happened at all. What? Well, there you have it. The Heart of Stone, another incredibly lame Netflix exclusive. You know their movies really are the bottom shelf of a blockbuster video rental store. Aren't they? What a time to be alive. Did you waste your time watching this one? Or have you learned your lesson unlike me and said Netflix movie? Hard pass. And yes, before you make the comment, jotting down two or three decent ones like Molly's Game or whatever those things are with Chris Hemsworth. Yes, on occasion, a blind squirrel finds a nut. But for the most part, it's pretty awful. Their average is garbage. They would never make the big leagues if it was a batting score. All right, let me know if you watch this pile of shit. Leave a comment. If you had a good time, please subscribe to the channel if you like what I'm doing. I post movie reviews, podcasts, live streams, all sorts of good stuff here every single week. I'd love to have you stick around. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to turn and gaze at Gal Gadot and wonder how she keeps getting work. Oh yeah, it's because she's stunningly gorgeous. Of course.