Keep an eye on this page and we’ll let you know when a definite release date is announced for the UK and if there's an air date and channel for the US and internationally. The new Gal Gadot feature is terrible in other, more interesting ways as well, but the end result isn’t worth your time or attention regardless.The six-part thriller will premiere on ITVX in 2024 and will also be shown on ITV1 some months later. Netflix has produced solid action movies in the past ( The Old Guard is solid, and I give both of the Extraction films a pass), but Heart Of Stone shares much more in common with The Gray Man and Red Notice: big films with solid budgets, marquee names and far-flung set pieces that are so ridiculously formulaic that they are rendered boring. Heart Of Stone adds to Netflix's catalogue of 'Action Movies So Formulaic That They're Boring' It can’t even execute interesting worldbuilding without tripping over itself: for example, The Charter is split into different divisions named after playing card suits, and Rachel is designated the Six Of Hearts – which is just needlessly and pointlessly redundant with the name of the A.I. The bad dialogue hinders the development of interesting personalities, which means that the whole movie is driven by plot over story. And the only thing worse than the characters regularly explaining everything are the constant failed reaches for something resembling witty banter. The concept of subtle exposition is an alien one to Heart Of Stone, which seems to use every blunt approach to info dumping that is possible – from exclamations like, “I can't believe it – Europe's most wanted arms dealer seen for the first time in three years!” to Rachel talking to herself at full volume in an empty room while typing away at her computer. If the strange morality doesn’t get to you, the eye roll-inducing dialogue will. With cringy dialogue, endless exposition and rough worldbuilding, Heart Of Stone's script is a mess.

It’s usually a good thing when a film presents antagonists who have reasonable and relatable motives and points of view, but things get thrown out of whack when the characters being presented as villains are arguably more reasonable and relatable than the heroes. story in the same medium that brought us The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it’s a challenging perspective that throttles the story. I suppose you could give the movie points for originality as far as it being a pro-A.I. The whole thing is so backwards that you could dub “The Entity” over every mention of The Heart and “The Syndicate” over every mention of The Charter, and Heart Of Stone would mostly work as a villain-centric story set in the Mission: Impossible universe (and instantly be recognized as the worst film in the franchise). Heart Of Stone has a surprising approach to the subject of artificial intelligence. Perhaps it’s an influence from the film’s pro-artificial intelligence stance, but the whole feature feels like it’s been pumped out of a computer – the two hour runtime full of stilted, exposition-ridden dialogue, a trope-packed story with confounding worldbuilding and blue screen/VFX-heavy action. It demonstrates a shocking lack of any kind of feel for the zeitgeist regarding technology, though that’s just one issue with the new Netflix release. A dedicated agent for The Charter, Gal Gadot’s Rachel Stone doesn’t actually differ all that much in philosophy from Esai Morales' Gabriel in Dead Reckoning, and the film argues so strongly early on in favor of The Heart’s strictly utilitarian, logic-only morality that you expect it to be the starting point for a twist, but that twist never comes. A thorough knockoff of Mission: Impossible, the movie has its own clandestine organization full of superspies that monitors threats around the globe, but the hook with The Charter is that every move they make is dictated by The Heart, an artificial intelligence that has eyes on every inch of the planet, has access to every computer and is advanced enough to calculate any action’s odds of success. Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and some languageĪrriving almost exactly one month later and attempting to offer a counterpoint is director Tom Harper’s Heart Of Stone. Starring: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Paul Ready, Jing Lusi, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo, and Matthias Schweighöfer

Written By: Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder

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