Review of Heart of Stone

Heart of Stone (I) (2023)
3/10
A good story gone limp
28 August 2023
Basically, this is a John Henry story. It's about the heroic human in competition against the machines that can ostensibly do the job better. Unfortunately, the story has no purchase because rather than a steam drill, which we can get our head around, the machine is a supercomputer of enormous but ill-defined power. It can do everything that helps the plot along, but it's not good enough to give you any help that would spoil the plot by solving problems prematurely. And meanwhile, the heroes and villains can dodge bullets and burn rubber to the point where there seem to be no rules underlying the action. Someone should tell the writers that what makes Superman interesting isn't that he can do anything, it's that there are things that we realize even he can't do. Granted, though, from time to time the Heart of Stone surprises us with an accident that obstructs the heroes-- at least momentarily.

Like Gal Gadot's previous Netflix movie Red Notice, this one is said to be the start of a possible franchise starring Gadot as a hard-fighting protagonist (although stuntwomen are obviously doing all the physically demanding work in both movies). But I think Heart of Stone's chances of successfully starting a franchise are even less than Red Notice's chances.
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