Heart Of Stone, Why Alia, Why?

Heart  Of Stone(Netflix)

Rating: * ½

You need nerves  of  steel to sit through the  tortuous trashiness  of Heart Of Stone. Fans of  Gal  and our own gal Alia Bhatt  are especially advised to  stay away: it may be a  while before you would want to revisit  their films again.

Gal Gadot  plays Rachel Stone (don’t miss the sloppy pun in the title) a member  of an elite task force named the Charter . Which is basically  assigned to save the world from several  undesirable forces including topnotch hacker Keya Dhawan.

This is  as  good a time as any to let  you know that Alia comes into the picture  an hour into the  story , and even then she is  uncertain about what she is supposed to do. Or say.She drops in and out  probably wondering if it was worth it.She rattles of her lines as though reading from teleprinter. It is the only way she could get away with all  the  technical jargon on how to hack into classified  information without getting caught.

For a film meant to be seen at  home, Heart Of Stone seems to be location-heavy. Paris  and Spain are on the anvil. London and Lisbon also  fly by without adding anything substantial or even coherent to the  hackers’ hackneyed plot.

What I did gather  after  almost two hours of plodding is  that Gadot and her team are wannabe Mission Impossiblers,possibly on the lookout for their espionage franchise. But sorry, Gadot is  no Cruise, although she tries hard. The stunts  are strictly for the fans. I mean, every time Gadot somersaults, I didn’t flip. She didn’t give me reason to.Her manoeuvres are purely green-screen antics.

If  the  action  sequences are meant to be so oafish, why spend so much money going to various countries?And who are these selfimportant aspirational 007s?  I am clueless.The script is so underwritten it  seems every episode is over-written to cover up the emptiness of  the  goings-on and the characters who are more  sinned against than sinned.

The screenplay  by Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder plays it  by the numbers. One big sequence  spirals  into another even before the body-count is determined. During one such interlude  Gal Gadot and her team are dancing in a rented apartment when everything explodes.

I wish I could tell you that Heart Of Stone is filled with surprises. But that won’t be true. The ‘surprises’ are orchestrated for impact and a there  is  feeling of inertia in the plot  although  the story and the characters are constantly  moving.

It’s like going to  a ‘surprise’ party you already know  about.The  performances are strictly functional, with Jamie Dorman trying to play mysterious when his personality is the opposite of secretive. Gal Gadot is sexily mysterious  but here she resembles Priyanka Chopra in Citadel   and not in a good way.

As for Alia  Bhatt, the biggest mystery is why she agreed to be part of this  film which is neither mysterious not  engaging.Just bland and jaded.