Heart of Stone, Gal Gadot’s stunts would impress even Tom Cruise
The Israeli actress makes good use of a parachute, a motorbike and a flying suit as she brings a touch of 007 to Heart of Stone.
Heart of Stone (M)
Netflix
★★★½
The espionage thriller Heart of Stone, starring Gal Gadot, has all the ingredients of the Mission Impossible franchise: rapid-fire action, stupendous stunts and the requirement that viewers suspend their disbelief. Its motto might be: If Tom can do it, Gal can too.
It also adds a touch of 007. The thrills and spills start somewhere James Bond would approve of: a casino in the Italian alps, where MI6 agents are on the trail of an international arms dealer. Their tech whiz, Rachel Stone (Gadot), is told to remain in the surveillance van. “You are not a field agent,” the licence-to-kill MI6 operatives remind her.
She does, until the mission turns sour. She enters the casino, wins at blackjack, faces a squad of professional assassins and does what Simon Pegg’s MI tech whiz Benji Dunn can only dream of.
Then she asks for a parachute. Then a motorbike. Then a flying suit. Each is used in an over-the-top fashion Tom Cruise would applaud.
“Who the hell are you?’’ a dazed and dazzled MI6 agent asks her.
“It’s complicated,’’ she replies.
She speaks the truth. The pre-credits sequence in the alps suggests a laptop is not the only weapon Agent Stone has at her disposal.
And that’s just the first of a series of twists and turns in this entertaining two-hour movie directed by British filmmaker Tom Harper, who has episodes of Peaky Blinders on his directorial CV.
The script is by Greg Rucka, a novelist and comic book writer, and Allison Schroeder, who was Oscar nominated for co-writing the 2016 film Hidden Figures.
It has the dry humour characteristic of spy stories. There are no Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman jokes, which is admirable given Rucka has written editions of that particular DC comic.
The other main characters are torture-scarred MI6 agent Parker (Jamie Dornan), 22-year-old Indian computer programmer Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt) and a woman known as the King of Hearts (Sophie Okonedo).
Of course, as with Agent Stone, each of them may or may not be who the say they are. This is a cloak and dagger story where being a double agent is but a starting point.
The King of Hearts runs an organisation called The Charter. It is purportedly made up of ex-spies who have gathered to do what their respective governments can not or will not do.
“When governments fail, the only thing left is The Charter,’’ she says.
The Charter has four divisions, one for each suit in a deck of cards. Late in the film we see who is running Diamonds and it is a bit of a treat. I won’t spoil it. Big Name.
The heart of the title is twofold.
First, there is a computer program known as the heart that can hack into anything, anywhere, any time. Whoever owns it “owns the world”. Why steal a nuclear missile when you can control every nuclear missile on the planet and the like.
The desire to own the “greatest skeleton key in the world” puts everyone mentioned above in life or death conflict that swings from Italy to Portugal to the Senegal desert to Iceland.
Second, the heart itself has no heart. It is a computer code that crunches numbers and works out probability. If the odds are that killing X and Y will be of net benefit to the world, then it’s mission possible: X and Y should die.
That’s not how humans think, or at least not all of them. It’s Agent Stone’s heart, as the title suggests, that causes her to make decisions that are far against the odds.
Gadot is a pleasure to watch and the supporting cast all chip in. If this is the first in a series of Gal Gadot-led MI-like films, as the producers said when the project was announced, I look forward to the next one.
Red, White & Royal Blue (MA15+)
Prime Video
★★★½
You know the fairy tale about the kiss that turns a frog into a prince? The drama-comedy Red, White & Royal Blue is that fable in reverse. Neither the kisser nor the kissed want to turn into literal frogs but they hope for something close to it.
“I fell in love with a person who happens to be a man who happens to be a prince,’’ says the kisser. “Do you ever wonder who you’d be if you were an anonymous person in the world?’’ asks the kissed.
To be fair to the frog, it’s not a one-way street. Both kisser and kissed do a lot of smooching in this entertaining, humorous, high-spirited adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s best-selling 2019 novel.
The prince is Prince Henry (British actor Nicholas Galitzine), second-in-line to the British throne. He’s not the heir but the spare, he notes in a nod to Prince Harry’s recent memoir.
The kisser is Alex Claremont-Diaz (American actor Taylor Zakhar Perez), son of the US President Ellen Claremont (a terrific Uma Thurman).
The setting is nowish. Henry and Alex are in their early 20s and share the burden of being impossibly handsome. They first met at a climate conference in Mel-born, as an American TV reporter calls it, and took an immediate dislike to each other.
“He’s the world’s rudest person,” is the undiplomatic American perspective. “He’s the world’s most irritating person,” is the snooty royal reply.
Then there are two meet cute moments. The first is a spectacular scene at Buckingham Palace involving Henry, Alex, too much alcohol and a 75,000 pounds wedding cake.
“Cakegate”, as the media calls it (as I suspect would happen in real life), causes ripples on both sides of the Atlantic. Alex’s mom, 14 months from an election, has a lot invested in a job-producing trade deals with the UK.
She orders Alex into damage control, which leads to the second only-in-movies close encounter between Henry and Alex. It’s in a storage closet in an American school and it’s borderline frottage.
After this Henry texts Alex. Asked how he got the number of the US President’s son, he texts back, “MI6. Not kidding.” Later, when Madame President offers some sex education advice, her son rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe they gave you the nuclear codes.”
This smart, well-written, well-acted 118-minute movie is full of jokes which traverse both sides of the pond, from Brexit and (I think) Richard III to the annual presidential pardon of a thanksgiving turkey.
“Don’t you have to be convicted of a crime to receive a pardon?” Henry inquires. I can imagine that thought running through Donald Trump’s head right now.
It’s steamily romantic, as the MA15+ rating suggests. “I went to an English boarding school, dear,” Henry tells Alex as they move from text to touch. “Trust me, you are in good hands.”
It’s also emotionally dramatic. When each young man comes out, Alex to his election-mode mother and Henry to his grandfather, King James III (a wonderful cameo from Stephen Fry), the result is not what you might expect. So what would happen if a British prince and the son of the US president fell in love? The short answer, in this film, is: a lot! Could they possibly be together? That’s something for viewers to find out.
This intelligent, witty, thought-provoking film is the directorial debut of American playwright Matthew Lopez, whose 2018 drama The Inheritance was a hit in London and New York, winning an Olivier and a Tony.
That play, set in New York’s gay community during the AIDs crisis, is based on the 1910 novel by British writer EM Forster who, like his compatriot in the film under review, had to keep his homosexuality under wraps.
“Prince Henry belongs to Britain,’’ Henry tells Alex as they start to explore each other’s lives. He then reveals his five-word actual name and says that person “has to belong to himself, or I’ll vanish”.
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